


to love all dying things

by offlight



Series: time and happiness [3]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Accidental Found Family, Blood and Violence, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Childhood Friends, Childhood Memories, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Post-Blue Lions Route (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Reconciliation, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-17
Updated: 2020-09-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:54:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26507047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/offlight/pseuds/offlight
Summary: On the heaviness of hope, the volatility of heart, and the quiet of the end.// final companion piece to “where are those boys of yesteryear?” and “up late in the blue half-light”
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Felix Hugo Fraldarius
Series: time and happiness [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1558450
Comments: 19
Kudos: 67





	to love all dying things

**Author's Note:**

> \- there are quite a few references to the first two fics in the series and it may be hard to follow without context

Three figures take up their positions in a courtyard, seven years after the War of Unification.

Two of them are standing, postures ramrod straight in the way that betrays years of training and discipline. They are two faces that are familiar enough that anyone on the streets would recognize them—King Dimitri and General Fraldarius, well-loved and well-respected heroes from the war.

The third sits on a stool pushed to the side, thin shoulders hunched. A faded quilt is pulled over his shoulders and clenched tight over his chest, gap between the edges covered by a long, white beard, braided into large plaits. This is not a face that anyone would recognize, but is an important soul—Sir Gervasius, an old man-at-arms, who had trained the king and his general as children.

It is a private courtyard, tucked away from the bustle of the Gautier market district, with limestone tiles long cracked by age, tendrils of ivy anchored tight to pillars, assorted pots that line the walls. Though the liquid in them is frozen over, they will soon melt into collections of rainwater and algae.

“Do you have any rules?” Felix asks, twirling his dulled swordpoint against the ground in circles. It’s unclear whether he is anxious or excited.

Old Gervasius leans back in his chair with a soft groan that puffs out from his mouth in a cloud.

“Don’t lose.”

Felix wrinkles his nose. Old Gervasius cackles, his voice catching on itself.

“Perhaps we can agree to limit our strength,” Dimitri adds, “For a demonstration of our growth, it would be unnecessary to go so far as to bruise.”

“Afraid because you’re out of practice?”

Dimitri stares. A smile pulls at the left corner of his mouth. “Are you goading me, Felix?”

“Old Gervasius says no rules.”

“Between ourselves, then?”

“You’re stalling,” Felix points out.

Dimitri looks to Old Gervasius, who rolls his eyes.

“We are all too old for me to resolve your little squabbles,” he says.

Another exchanged look between Dimitri and Felix.

“No hits to bleed or maim,” Felix says. “Yield verbally.”

Dimitri seems to ponder this for a moment. He taps the end of his spear against the ground in a measured tempo. Felix’s eyes flick down to it for just a moment.

“That suits me.”

Things sorted, they both straighten, shrugging tension off of their shoulders. Felix flourishes his blade in a sweep out over his shoulder, down to a loop to the ground, stops with the dull edge forward. Dimitri bows his head in response, repositions his grip on his spear.

Old Gervasius pulls his back up straighter, enough to lean forward. His eyes pin on the two of them.

“Well. Get on with it.”

.

It is almost offensive how little Castle Fhirdiad changes in the years after the war.

Nearly everything outside the castle has shifted—crop breeds, vegetables, trade routes, even something as stupid and simple as what glaze is most popular on pottery (a rich, mossy green—a new mix of the highest-quality pigments from the Goneril and Bergliez regions). Old villages and towns have crumbled and reshaped into new hybrid cities, mix of Old Kingdom and Empire and Alliance peoples, arguing over opinions of neighboring countries and differences in regional dialects and local market prices. Magistrates and nobles collaborate, reluctantly in some cities and happily in others, in defining the wellbeing of their subjects. Guilds swell to massive proportions, threading across cities, in constant argument within and amongst themselves. The new country is loud and rambunctious and still learning the rules.

But the castle remains old. The castle remains drafty. The stone floors still sound the exact same, after all these years, when Felix makes his way downstairs from his temporary lodgings towards the Great Hall. The sound does funny things to his mind, makes everything feel familiar and foreign at once.

Gusts of winter chill from cracks around windowpanes chase him as he moves, trailing him as he edges past castle staff and heralds. He sees flashes of movement out of the corner of his eyes—rushed bows and stammers in greeting as people recognize him—and walks a little faster in response.

By the time he makes it to the Great Hall, he has sped up to a light jog. He doesn’t control his strength very well and, as a result, pushes a little too hard on the double doors. They flings out and slam against the wall in a loud bang.

At the sound, group of people gathered at a great wood table all turn to look at him. There’s a clatter of metal dropping.

“Felix!” he hears someone squeak—by the pitch, likely Annette.

“That’s one way to make an entrance,” says Ingrid, looking largely unaffected. She turns back to spreading what looks like a glob of jam onto a fist-sized hunk of bread.

He considers ignoring her but remembers that she’s gotten angry at him for doing so in the past. “I was being chased,” he explains.

“What?” she asks. “By who?”

The oak table that his old allies are seated at is pushed against the enormous central fireplace, already lit to fend off the persistent cold. Felix had been told that it would only be a small breakfast this morning with a few of Dimitri’s closest friends—despite this, the tabletop is loaded with innumerable bowls of boiled eggs, porridge, fruit, baskets of sweet and savory breads bigger than Ashe’s face and with loaves the length of human limbs.

Indulgence truly favors the victors of war. Felix takes the empty chair, stares at a few teacups and saucers balanced half-on-half-off the table and tries to nudge them forward. They only bump against the margarine, causing a chain reaction of cookie tins and sausage plates to shift. He decides to let it alone.

Mercedes passes him his own teacup, adding to the problem. “Would you like some eggs?” He shakes his head, reaching out to grab random offerings before she could fuss over him. It doesn’t shake the small smile off her face, though he wishes it would.

“It sounds so dramatic when you say chased,” Sylvain pipes up, arching his eyebrow high, looking an idiot with clotted cream caught on his chin. “Was it all of your adoring fans?”

He should have ignored Ingrid. “Just people.”

“ _Felix_. Your fans are people, too.”

“You’ve been here for a while, they will adjust to seeing you around soon,” Dedue says, pulling strings of fiber off a banana.

Annette claps, tucks a loose lock of hair up behind her ear before picking up her spoon again. “That’s true, you’ve been back for three weeks already! How fast.” The hair falls out anyway, dips into her porridge. “It feels like it’s been just a few days, don’t you think?”

He does. It’s hard to imagine that it’s been nearly a month now that he’s left the Old Empire. When he thinks on it, he’s definitely been back long enough to re-acclimate to the weather. He’s completely forgotten how muggy the winters get in the south, how all the snow melts into cloying rain before it even makes it out of the clouds. It’s not any weather he’s missed.

“We were just talking about how the winter is warmer this year, before you joined us.”

“I couldn’t tell.”

“It was awful last year.” Annette looks up and frowns. “Or was it two years ago? The year the front doors froze and the staff had to chip it back open?”

“Two years,” Dimitri confirms.

It’s the first time he’s spoken since Felix arrived, as he had been focused on prying a boiled egg from its shell with a tiny spoon. The egg is now sitting perfect in his hands, no dents or pieces carved out.

Another moment and he’s popped it into his mouth.

“That year was horrible. I still remember that there were many stories of people being found frozen on the streets by passerby. The healers were working full days and nights to revive them.”

Felix remembers winters like this in his youth, the way his father would open the doors of the manor for townsfolk to shelter with them through the worst of the nights.

They feel distant now after years of seeing the opposite—people toppling over during the summers, seizing and vomiting in the streets. It’s the worst in Enbarr and other cities in the southern peninsula. It affects the elderly and children the most. Treatment often involves staying in cool corners of houses, sipping rather than gulping down water. Healers have their own ways of addressing the heat as well. That, unfortunately, is beyond him.

“Casualties were worst in Gautier territory, weren’t they?”

“Casualties tend to be the worst in Gautier territory when the cold comes into play,” Sylvain says.

“Still, the caravan relay system you proposed that winter saved the lives of many,” Ashe adds. His hair is gathered back from his face in a ponytail so small it looks like a nub. “We’ll be better prepared for next time—though hopefully there will never be a next time, Goddess willing.”

Sylvain smiles. He shakes his head, catches sight of Felix.

“Well, General, will _you_ be around here long enough to see the next winter?” Sylvain says.

His voice is mock serious in a way that makes Felix want to leave immediately—not the city, just the room. He also doesn’t miss the way that everyone in the table turns to stare at him.

“I don’t know.”

Dimitri is the worst of them, his knife still moving despite having spread the butter so thin onto his bread that it’s practically invisible. It’s miserable to watch.

“Are there pressing obligations you must see to in the south?” he asks.

There are. He’s been away far longer than he had planned and has already gotten letters from Caspar about hints of troop movements outside of Fodlan. He hadn’t realized the full impact of his presence until a few countries to the south began to catch wind of the North Star (curse that name) being away to the capital, leaving the security of their borders to others.

A few of their greedier neighbors have been keeping a close eye on them since the end of the war, even manipulating a few uprisings and rebellions in Old Empire lands to keep them weak. It’s one of the reasons why he simply can’t leave—him being present displays a more unified front for both their enemies and the Old Empire soldiers. Felix knows there’s significance in him being there, where they can see him sweat and bleed alongside their own commanders. It earns their trust in a way that would be impossible otherwise.

Secretly, it’s unclear to him why he’s stayed in Fhirdiad for nearly a full month now. The trip back to the manor was one that had caused him agony for years, given him many strange dreams and thoughts, distracted him from his duties up until the day he finally wrote Dimitri the letter to meet him in his childhood home. That action had spurred some hidden source of courage in himself that carried him the whole ride back.

But the decision to come back to Fhirdiad? Well, he’s not sure.

Dimitri had just looked so hopeful—and it was true that his birthday had been near. It must have been an effect of being alone with him in that house after all those years.

Yule, on the other hand, had been an…unfortunate coincidence.

Felix doesn’t know what blend they steeped this morning, but it makes his tongue dry. “I must return soon,” he says, and crams some grapes into his mouth.

Ashe frowns. “The squires will miss you.”

“I didn’t say _today_.”

“Still. When you do. You have quite a talent for teaching, Felix—well, when you feel like it. Make sure you stop by to see them the next time you come back.”

“That’s fine.”

He’s not sure if Ashe is being sincere or not, but he is. Ashe has a good group, all of them eager for knowledge and practice. He wouldn’t mind seeing them again.

“I guess this doesn’t surprise me,” Ingrid says. She sighs in that old way of hers. “You weren’t planning on staying so long from the beginning. We were pretty persistent.”

This conversation has made the air around the table unfortunately morose.

Felix tries to pay it no mind and glances up in time to catch Dimitri’s gaze. Dimitri smiles in a way that Felix can’t read, looks back down to his heavily buttered bread.

“I would not want our fussing to keep you from being where you are needed,” he says, before taking a bite.

.

His months, for the past five or six years—

Aegir as his base and center, a convenient location within the Old Empire that gives him easy access to uprisings within central cities and villages. Well-fitted with adequate resources for his soldiers, sat comfortably at the center of a network of land and sea trade routes.

He doesn’t know the extent of the opulence in the Old Empire until he sees the Aegir Palace firsthand—columns of gold-rimmed marble, waterfalls of ivy spilling down from pots hung so high along lofted, painted ceilings that the staff must scale tall ladders in order to tend to and repair them, courtyards with bubbling fountains the scent of jasmine, grapevines twisted along carved murals of forests so that in the fall the relief trees take on plump leaves of green and indigo, clothing threaded with silks so colorful and soft it makes the merchants and remaining nobility look as lovely and useless as fluffed pillows.

He, understandably, does not stay in the palace when he can help it. The broad plains just outside the city gates make for good earth to camp on, and it’s here that he keeps his new command in the first year. After he’s had enough of the complaining about mosquitoes and the construction of a new barracks within the city is completed, their base moves.

This is where most of his command remain indefinitely, those who eventually multiply and grow self-sufficient enough to branch and establish units in other cities. His smaller, more elite regiment stay with him, following him as he rides out on short notice at the most urgent and fast-developing rebellions.

They are lively few years. The time blends together, one task after another, into a beautiful, numb smear. What moments he doesn’t spend on defense he spends on logistics regarding his not-so-secret secret projects.

It is a significant headache to organize supplies and structure for orphanages and academies. There are truly a staggering number of war orphans, surviving within their own pockets and groups around town, untrusting of adults that commonly believed them to be inherently cursed and unlucky and who often shunned them for their smell and self-defensive ferocity. Another in a line of post-war realities that they had never been told when they were younger.

In the years immediately following the war, there was concern when older children began to collect and train themselves into ragtag militias, with the intention of joining larger rebellion efforts. Some of the rebel groups had the decency to turn them away, but a few did not. Those fights were unspeakably grotesque. Thankfully—after the fourth year or so of the academies being open—the number of children on the streets begin to fall.

All of it made for repetitive, straightforward work. There was simply too much to take care of. It often left him too tired to dream, to miss, to slow down and wallow like the others.

It had been better this way. A few letters here and there to those back in the Old Kingdom, enough details to pacify their curiosity, and on to the next.

This had been a good routine. It had worked for years.

Damn that northern wind.

.

Felix is not a fool. He regards truth objectively, parsed as carefully as he can manage from the tint of feeling.

He doesn’t think Dimitri hopes for his return out of sentimentality. He’s not entirely sure if that’s even possible for Dimitri. Would he allow himself to be swayed by something as solitary and selfish as wanting Felix back for nostalgia’s sake alone? _Could_ he—with all those layers of poised removal?

No. It makes no sense. The others may be convinced of such softness, but Felix knows better.

Perhaps it’s a sense of failure that binds him instead. That, in all the future Dimitri has been crafting, Felix’s missing presence is a tear in the tapestry, a public display of lacking leadership or failure to understand one of those closest to him. That every year of Felix’s distance gives proof to Dimitri that there is still reason people would want to stay away. A confirmation of the lengths he has yet to go to be any semblance of worthy.

This, of course, is not Felix’s intention.

In fact, this whole ordeal creates a disgusting tangle in him. It annoys him to no end. The extent to which even _his_ decision to return to Fhirdiad—if he ever wanted to return—that even _that_ would become another loss to Dimitri. Would become an affirmation that Dimitri had sent the right combination of letters, that this little dance between them was necessary in the first place. If Dimitri had been indifferent and cold, Felix may even have returned years ago—if Dimitri hadn’t chosen to stifle him and to long so openly, so messily, over letters that Felix is now forced to keep. He isn’t sure what it is between them that makes everything so needlessly complicated. All of it a match within a match.

It’s all useless. There is no going against the grain on this—leaving the path walked by his ancestors with the full separation in the way he imagined when he was younger. He was likely doomed from the moment he pointed his feet the same direction as the rest of them.

He’s lagging behind, maybe. But the bottom of his heart, where the heaviest sentiment collects, recognizes that he’s always known where he would go, where he would end up.

.

The cold in the Old Kingdom is persistent and stubborn, similar in nature to all the people who live there. It is so _obnoxiously_ persistent that Felix finds the ghost of it trailing him, circling him like a curse, weeks and months after he returns to Aegir.

It’s no physical presence. It seems to be purely in his own head. Whiffs of sharp, clean cold in the air, what is an objective impossibility in cloying Old Empire summers. Colors caught from the corners of his eyes—wildflowers the shade of Blaiddyd blue, dark utensils of Gautier ore, trademark chicory bloom-detailing on rugs from Galatea.

These little, nonsensical observations hit him like a wave. He hadn’t realized that there were so many details he was missing in the world until his mind had suddenly become obsessed with them. Now he sees them wherever he looks.

“There are many of these dogwoods up in the north,” Felix says once, nodding towards a tree a distance away from the shaded overhang he and Caspar are standing under as they review reports. “They’re hardy enough to make it through the roughest winters. Surprising you can find them here.”

“Oh, cool,” Caspar says, looking up from a sheet on leather reserves to follow his gaze. “Wait, we have those everywhere. You haven’t noticed?”

He isn’t sure what type of response he had been hoping for, but this wasn’t it. “I haven’t.”

“Really? Wow, no, they’re everywhere. They grow easily, so I’ve heard. Are they the same type as the ones in the Old Kingdom? In this region the white ones like these are the most common, but there are strains near Hevring and Oche with—”

“Pink and purple, yes. I remember now.”

“Oh, right, I forgot you were stationed there before! You’re full of surprises aren’t you, Felix? Never would have thought of you as someone that liked flowers.”

“I’m not,” Felix says.

Caspar laughs and whacks him with his stack of papers. Felix wonders when he became someone that looked like he would enjoy being whacked with a stack of papers.

“What color are the ones from the Old Kingdom?”

They’re white. Felix fights a sigh and looks back down at the report in his hands—a count of bow maintenance materials in the city guard. “Go see for yourself.”

“I should,” Caspar says, frowning. “We _are_ all one country now. The war’s been over for so many years, you’d think I’d make it up further than Arianrhod...well. I guess it’s still hard to convince my body to leave home.”

That statement remains in the air, dangling, obvious. Felix ignores it pointedly until Caspar breaks the silence by flipping a paper over.

“How was it when you went back to visit?”

He had gone back nearly...four? No, five months ago now. That number surprises him. It is both bigger and smaller than he expected.

“Not too much has changed,” Felix says, balancing the report on a crate to sign it before turning to the next. One from the Aegir Orphanage on their budget for the upcoming half-year. He looks at this one a little more carefully, they’d been short on socks for a while. “People are the same. The weather is still cold.”

The haunting returns—someone walks by them on the street, the scent on them smelling something reminiscent of the spiced lamb the royal kitchens stew every other week.

“How was His Majesty?”

“He’s fine. Still alive.”

“Well, geez, I sure hope so. I meant more like if he seemed happy or sad or stressed or—”

It’s hard to focus on budgets with Caspar babbling away.

“He seemed entertained enough,” Felix says. He makes sure to stare as pointedly at his work as possible before Caspar finally gives up.

.

The way they fight to clump and cling to each other—it reminds Felix of the ways forest growth clambers around itself at the sign of new light, choking out and crushing and entangling with their neighbors so thoroughly their roots become a thick, indistinguishable mass under the soil.

He sees it mirrored in how they all gravitate back to Fhirdiad in predictable, contained loops. Ingrid writes that her loop is between Galatea and the capital. Sylvain, Gautier and the capital. Annette’s is even smaller—the castle to the Royal School of Sorcery to her cottage in a quiet section of town, next to the restaurant district. Worker bees to a hive.

When he was younger, he had believed this was within their power to change. For every story about loyalty, there was another about the sweat of carving a path for yourself—of stumbling across a mountain or town that would feel resonant in a way that no place has felt before, teach you the solidity of belonging. Prevent you from walking the same, flooded trenches carved by the family that came before you.

There are some things that cannot be outrun. It’s something deep in who they’ve grown to become, he supposes. It’s the same way that they speak a language of repeating characters, organized and reorganized to new shapes, always held tight to the same meanings. The way that Dimitri’s letters are all different and the same—

 _The craftworkers have been experimenting with preserving flower blooms in candles, enclosed is one made with the poppies you planted those months ago_ —

and—

 _With Yuletide approaching, will you be returning?_ —

and—

_The heatwave from Albinea has kept us hot as well. It will be a slow fall this year—_

and—

_How quiet the castle grows, in the late-night hours when everyone is asleep. It is troubling to be left alone with my thoughts, but there is also peace in the silence. I’ve grown fond of walking a certain turn in the garden on these nights. I can show you the next time you return, if you would be interested._

.

It’s a cold afternoon when he first reaches the rebuilt Conand Tower marking the southern boundary of Fraldarius territory—though it’s unclear if it’s truly cold or if it’s just that he’s been cooked too thoroughly after so many years in the south.

A light flits from the watchtower, alighting on the ground before him. One of the guards, perhaps, who’d recognized him or his horse.

The greater town looks largely unchanged. He keeps his eyes straight as he rides, but even that isn’t enough to keep him from noticing them on his peripherals. An old shop that used to sell dyed yarn, now turned into a cheese shop with long lines snaking out the door and around the corner. A pastry store that still smells of butter outside its door. An apothecary that used to keep its leftmost shelf stocked full of licorice.

“Glenn told me that if you hold it in your mouth long enough,” Ingrid said once, her mouth bubbled around a large roll of licorice, chin tilted up high to keep from drooling, “It starts to taste like smoke.”

He remembers already being halfway through chewing his own piece when she says this. “No,” he thinks he’d responded.

“You have to keep—no—stop! Felix!”

The road up to the manor through the village is shorter than if he’d taken the longer way around—through the line of the forest in the west. That would have been his path of choice were it not for the heavy rain and mudslides from the days prior. However, riding through the village does change his plans enough that he arrives on the doorstep of the manor hours before he’s expected.

Duchess Amelie Fraldarius has no idea what to do with him.

“We don’t set out for another five hours,” she says. A dignitary stands in a doorway, watching them, wringing his hands. Very young—must be new.

“I’m aware,” Felix responds.

She gives him another passing glance. She cuts a tidy figure in all black and gray, high boots that click on wood floors when she walks. Her hair is pulled tight into a braided bun at the top of her head. With age, it has begun to streak with silver. Her father had grayed in his later years, but Felix’s father died before any of his gray set in.

“I don’t have the time to entertain you,” she says. He can assume as much—she’s holding a thick stack of reports in her left hand, wilting over her hand like dead flowers. “Do you want work?”

“I can amuse myself.”

She’s already half out of the room, headed into the hallway toward her study. The dignitary hurries after her after she holds open the door for a few pointed moments.

“Good. I’ll meet you at the stables when it’s time to leave.”

He doesn’t stay in the manor. It’s too difficult to keep his eyes from wandering. The air inside is made so stagnant that all his breath lays dead in his chest. It reminds him of the feeling of training during muggy months, the way heat and moisture soaks deep into your skin to the point where it begins to congeal against your bones, pull you to where all you can do is sit and lean against a tree.

But the halls are not hot. They’re drafty and filled with guards and staff that throw him glances out of the corners of their eyes, as if they aren’t entirely certain whether they should greet him. He’d only come back once after he gave up his title—with Dimitri, a little over a year ago now—but it feels different from this. This is not the place for him.

He turns and leaves. He’s already made restless by this entire trip. The yearly summit with Sreng dignitaries was not an event that he’d ever had any express interest in before, had always avoided and was never even formally invited due to his lack of title.

The letter in his pocket burns a perfect square against his skin. Inconsequential words that would have sloughed off him easily before, now made heavier by either the violet ink or the winter haunt that’s tailed him all this time—

_—but know that it would be so nice to see you there._

.

A clack and a clatter—Dimitri’s spear is wrenched out of his grip with the inertia of Felix’s sword twisting it backward. It falls onto the cobblestone, ricochets blunt-end off of the floor, and slowly settles into silence.

Felix steps back. He had evaded and kept his distance well, closed in seven minutes at the first opening, won without Dimitri landing so much as a single hit. His victory was clean and brutal in its efficiency.

They both turn to Old Gervasius, who stares back.

A few beats of silence stretch between them, bringing with it an awkwardness.

“Well?” Felix finally asks.

Old Gervasius exhales and leans back in his chair. He reaches up to run his hand over the large braid of his beard, rub at the frazzled bits too short to be tucked into it. “Well?” he retorts.

“This was the first time we’ve sparred in years,” Dimitri says, having bent to pick up his spear. He stands now, rubbing a smidge of dirt off as he continues, “Felix, you are sharp as ever. If anything, you are even faster than I recall.”

Felix frowns. “I’m not faster, you’re just slower. You’ve grown complacent.”

“I have,” Dimitri concedes. “My current duties call for different strengths. You are now the fighter between the two of us.”

Felix’s mouth presses into a wide, tight frown. Old Gervasius shakes his head.

“Neither of you have changed.”

This gets their attention.

“What?” Felix asks.

“I would demonstrate if we had any other fighters here. I wouldn’t be much of a fight, not these days.” Old Gervasius taps his right knee with a hand.

“What do you mean by that, Sir Gervasius?” Dimitri asks.

“By what, little king?”

“That we haven’t changed. What did you mean by that?”

“You two fight the same as you always have. Nothing different.”

“ _What_ hasn’t changed?” Felix demands.

“I have explained this to you both many times in the past.”

“Try again.”

“ _Felix._ ”

“I just want to understand. My technique and experience far surpass whatever skill I had when I was—a little—a child.”

“I don’t speak of your technique,” Old Gervasius says, tone dry enough to be mocking. “You should know that, after all this war. Could technique alone save your life?”

Felix’s frown deepens. Dimitri’s face has long blanked out the way that it does when he is thinking.

They are quiet for a few moments longer before Old Gervasius sighs.

“You will not learn this with words. Raise your weapons and go again. See if you can impress me.”

.

Felix is more than familiar with Dimitri’s weaknesses. He has spent his entire life probing for them.

He had no choice. It was done out of necessity—ever since they were young and standing across from each other in training fields, hands still too small to close around the circumference of their weapons, gripping them in all the wrong positions—because there was no other way for him to win.

There are many good reasons why swords do not spar against polearms. It does not make for good learning. The reach and radius of each are too different—polearms too deadly for too much distance, with the ability to stab and retract along the line of their shafts with a speed that makes them near impossible to approach.

Felix had known from youth that they are the weapon of choice for nobles, but he never liked them. His father had tried to start him on spears the same time that Dimitri started on his. It had worked for a while—he does still know how to wield a spear if necessary—but swords are different. They allow for control and precision, swift shifts of leverage and direction that polearms do not have.

They are flexible. Slice and stab. Turn the blade, grab it with your hands, bludgeon with the hilt.

His decision puts him at a crippling disadvantage when they train. All of the bouts look the same—a dance of distance, of watching, until an opening arises for the sword to close, to rush so quickly and overwhelmingly that the polearm has no choice but to succumb.

It is because of this that Felix is painfully familiar with Dimitri’s tells, the markers for how he transitions into violence. He can identify them more confidently than anyone else because he’d studied Dimitri like prey for years, ever since they were first taught to be dangerous.

They go something like this:

When they were youngest—a shake in his arms from the tension when he grips down hard on the shaft, a lead foot stepping too far to the side to act as a brace, balance shifting low, a moment to stop and brush his hair out of his face with the side of an arm, a question posed, “Are you ready, Felix?”

When they were older—a pause no longer than a half a breath to gather strength, eyes darting just slightly to the side in efforts to remember a technique or drill, left foot digging heel-first for better grip, a crooked and sheepish smile, a slow pull of his back arm to build momentum for a thrust.

Even older—a half-breath pause of stillness, a guarded and calculated flicker up and along Felix’s form, a swell in his bottom lip when he bites down on the corner of his mouth when focusing, a lead-hand flourish out of bad habit.

Older still—calm, so thick it weighs heavy in the air around them like the humidity before thunder. A smile without feeling, as if carved out of his face. The smallest inhale, flare of his nostrils, coming only a fraction of a second before a devastatingly quick jab.

And now?

Felix wouldn’t know. They’re still there—he’s sure of it. But he doesn’t know.

.

He rides out with Dimitri early one Sunday morning, just as the frost is cracking on the oak branches outside. The sun is piercingly bright.

“There is a reason I arranged for us to leave this early,” Dimitri explains, maybe because he sees how Felix has been alternating between shielding his eyes and yawning widely into his gloves. “The children have chores after breakfast. I have a meeting with the headmistress at that time.”

“You don’t have to explain.” Another yawn, one too big and fast for him to stop. “It’s fine.”

It is fine. Felix had woken up at dawn all the time when he was stationed in the Old Empire—it’s just that his classes, now, don’t typically begin until around noon. Unless he’s being called to help with tasks around the castle, he’s gotten into the bad habit of sleeping in. One that he should kick, now that it’s proven to be this inconvenient.

It’s a quick ride to the orphanage. There are two in Fhirdiad—the original main branch, Eean House, situated in the town just outside of the castle; and Barkett House, the expansion, opened just four years ago just within the final set of city walls.

When Felix had pressed Dimitri about these names over letters in the past, Dimitri’s responses had been cheerful.

_I was not the one who named both orphanages, but I am surprised you don’t recognize them. Perhaps your distance from the Kingdom is to blame for your memory. Eean and Barkett were two of the strongest stallions from the herd of wild horses befriended by Loog in his youth._

Felix’s response—

_Why should I have remembered that._

_I appreciate the symbolism_ , Dimitri had continued in another letter, sometime later. _Eean and Barkett were proud horses from the herd that had saved Loog once when he was lost on the moors. Do you recall the stories of how Loog had provided for them in the years afterward?_

—This Felix does, the ones of how Loog brought healers out of the capital for wild horses and everyone else in the kingdom thought him mad—

_They said that during times of war, it was as if the horses knew of Loog’s troubles and would come to his aid on the battlefield. They were never ridden as steeds, but attacked as a companion unit of cavalry. My father named Eean House after their autonomy and heart. I believed it was only fitting to name the second Barkett._

As they see the final set of city walls in the distance, begin to approach it, Dimitri points out a building on a hill that makes Felix squint.

Calling it Barkett House isn’t quite fitting—mansion would be more apt. The building is enormous and clearly more newly constructed when compared to other buildings in its vicinity.

“Most of the orphanages in the Old Empire are repurposed from older buildings,” Felix says.

“You’ve mentioned this in your letters. Estates of past nobles?”

“Those, and churches.”

Barkett House stands at four stories—not including a line of half-moon windows along the ground that he supposes delineates a basement floor used for storage. Its white-brick walls gleam with dignity and power, while each set of double windows lining the second and third floors are decorated with colorful, eclectic curtains.

When Felix examines them, he can tell that no two window dressings are alike. One of them is framed by curtains dyed shades of pink and green so blinding they hurt his eyes to look at them. He learns later that this is Battista’s room. There is another, two down and four across, that look from afar to be completely black but that he will learn soon to have little holes poked in mirroring constellations of stars. That room belongs to Paris. And then another, the leftmost set of windows on the highest floor, with a sheer red that looks pink in the light.

“Your Majesty!” a voice calls, rapidly approaching, as they dismount.

A girl, eyes darting between and around them with a speed that Felix can’t follow, hair in two short, thick braids the color of rust. He can pin her immediately from Dimitri’s letters—Magdalena. She looked exactly like what he’d expect of a girl who dove into a river in the winter on a dare.

These three are Dimitri’s favorites—though he had insisted over their letters that he did not have favorites—and are among the first to barrel out of the house in welcome. There are a few others as well, all of them in nightclothes, hair matted on the left or right, lines on their cheeks from pillows. Felix watches, admittedly entertained, when the younger ones latch themselves onto Dimitri’s legs and torso with a ferocity that only comes with youth.

“This is a dear friend of mine,” Dimitri explains. He’s picked up one of the youngest boys, after noticing how he was being jostled around by the bigger children, and now has him in a practiced hold against his hip. The child has already half-shoved a hand into Dimitri’s mouth, which he has to speak around as he continues, “General Fraldarius. He has been wanting to meet you all for a while now.”

This is not necessarily—or at least explicitly—true, but Felix doesn’t have time to point that out before he hears a gasp and a, “The North Star!” at the same time that a smaller voice pipes up, “He looks mean.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Sir General,” one of the children says. Felix learns later this is Paris—dark hair, wide-eyed, mouth always pulled tight into a cross of disapproval and neutrality. Easily a child that he could imagine asleep in a broom closet while adults tore apart the orphanage in search of him.

“General is not my given name,” Felix says, with steady patience. “You can call me Felix.”

“That’s a funny name.”

“No, there’s another boy named Felix in Eean House.”

“Who’s General, then?”

“A general is a leader at war,” the oldest boy speaks up, amused.

Dimitri nods in his direction, gently removes the small hand from his mouth. “Battista,” he whispers to Felix. That also makes sense. He could picture this lanky, sandy-haired child hunting and collecting poisonous toadstools out of curiosity.

The children seem to accept Battista’s answer readily. They need no more explanation for war—a quality that all of those born during and shortly before the Great War possess. The children Felix had been around in the Old Empire address war with empty eyes. Here, the older ones nod silently at each other. _As it is_ , they seem to be saying.

Being introduced to children feels much like an enemy interrogation. Questions are rattled off first by the younger ones—bolder, less aware of formality and decorum—and as Felix continues to answer, are soon supplied by the older children as well.

It happens very quick, and their little group doesn’t even make it through the door. Eventually, seats are pulled out and he and Dimitri take up post under a tree. Their chairs wobble on the roots. Sparse leaves drop onto their heads, which they brush off periodically.

“So you fight a lot, then?”

“I used to,” Felix says. “Your king did, too.”

“Well of course _he_ did,” the girl responds, sounding scandalized. “King Dimitri fought in the Great War. Were you there?”

Was he _there_? “Yes, I was there.”

“Oh. But did you _fight_?”

“Yes.”

“I see,” she says, a little miffed. In the silence of her thoughts, another child speaks up.

“Were you good?”

Felix snorts. “I’m alive, aren’t I?”

This comment is lost on them. Felix glances over, but Dimitri looks happily uninterested in helping him explain.

“I did fine.”

“Of course he’s good, he’s the North Star!” Magdalena says, with vigor. The nickname makes Felix sigh. “He’s the greatest fighter in all of Fodlan!”

“In the war, right?”

Felix opens his mouth to respond, but Magdalena cuts in.

“And outside of it as well! He’s held the biggest command in the Old Empire after the war.” Her hands shake with where they’re propped on her knees. Felix recognizes the deep purple bruises on her legs and forearms as training bruises. Grappling techniques. “The North Star began with few recruits in Aegir and over the years became the center of the southern defense! They say everyone trained by him fights like lightning, quick and deadly. All of our foreign neighbors fear him!”

Felix has no idea how to respond to this.

There is now an additional child clinging off the back of Dimitri’s shoulders. He has a hold on where her hands cross over his neck to keep her from falling. “Magdalena is very well-versed. She follows all of the latest reports from the Old Empire.”

She turns to him, beaming from the praise. But who supplies her with these reports? Felix narrows his eyes at Dimitri, who is suddenly too interested in scratching the side of his nose to respond.

“Are you here to play today?” Paris asks. “We can’t play. We have chores.”

“We’ll do them fast!” Magdalena says.

“What chores do you have?”

“We have to clean our rooms and dust the playroom and classrooms, and we have to haul water for dinner. And I’m assigned to rearranging the library.”

“And I have to water the garden!”

Dimitri adds, “There are also tasks that you may be able to help with, if we asked the headmistress.”

Felix had not come with the mental expectation of being put to manual labor, but he supposes that he doesn’t mind. Dimitri, he can already tell, was hoping that they would be able to ride back together, had already partitioned out the entire day to spend with the children. It’s not a problem, he supposes, as it is Sunday and he doesn’t have much else to do.

.

Felix must commend them for their strategy. They’ve played the long game, and it’s clearly worked.

Their excuses are insidious at first, convincingly disguised with the words _mandatory_ and _national defense_ and _of urgent importance_ , emboldened by his sudden willingness to re-enter to Old Kingdom. He becomes familiar with the valleys cutting between Oghma and Garreg Mach on his rides to Fhirdiad. There is mountain path in particular that, if the tide dips low enough to reveal it, has the ability to shorten his ride by two days.

It only takes a few months before they begin to grow messy. _Mandatory_ becomes _Dimitri has been asking about you_ and _national defense_ becomes _Dedue’s birthday party_ and _of urgent importance_ becomes _leave earlier and reach Charon by 6th WM or you’ll have to take the long road and Ashe and I don’t have time to wait_.

And it is not as if he doesn’t notice while it happens. He’s aware of every tiny give—how it’s suddenly more convenient for him to operate out of Varley, then Magdred, then Teutates, then Gideon—but what he misses is the greater shift. How, at some point, he’s disposed of all his Old Empire clothing for thicker fabric, has lost the feeling of humidity clinging his clothes to his skin, curling strands of hair around his head.

There is no great experience of returning home. There is the familiarity, sure, of Old Kingdom falls and winters, the way that ice clambers invisible over cobblestones so that you must walk more on your toes over heels to avoid falling. But there is no great _click_ of his body recognizing where it was raised, realizing it’s returned.

“I don’t know,” Ashe responds, confused, when Felix brings it up. “Is that a feeling that you can get? Aren’t you just talking about familiarity?”

Perhaps. Maybe there was no great secret all along. He supposes that wouldn’t be a surprise.

.

Dimitri has always had the advantage, but this doesn’t make Felix helpless against him. There are strategies to employ that can even the field. He’s had to study them carefully.

There is one that feels the best—that used to catch Dimitri off guard, but that he has since become used to. Nonetheless, it helps with some of the problems of distance and speed.

It works best with a longsword, one with enough length to alleviate some of the difference in reach. It involves him pulling the sword back far enough to where he can grip his left hand over the sharp of the blade. Felix remembers he had thought it looked dangerous when he first saw it demonstrated. How painful must it be to slice your own fingers open?

“This is not an uncommon technique, but it is not one for the faint of heart,” he remembers Old Gervasius saying while adjusting Felix’s fingers over the blade for the first time. “Even with gloves, many hesitate when executing these moves.”

“I would not hesitate,” Felix thinks he says in response. The metal is cold against his bare hand. He squeezes it experimentally to find the edge, tests how it pushes against the elasticity of his skin.

“You?” A scoff. “I know _you_ wouldn’t. Little one, you could do with more hesitation.”

Half-swording adds more precision to thrusts. It detracts just slightly from length, but its versatility makes the sacrifice worth it. It puts him in the perfect position to hook a spear shaft with his cross-guard, knock it aside with a quick, poised strike.

Something about half-swording is satisfying. He is taught all the ways to hold it properly to not cut into his own hands and is given gloves to prevent it from happening. These had all been brilliant discoveries. Weapons found where he didn’t even know there were any—the blunt end of his pommel, the lines of his cross-guard. He had believed, at the time, that there was a reward in making dangerous what was not before.

He remembers that Dimitri didn’t like it, especially not in the beginning. It had taken hours of arguing between them for it to become clear to Felix—that it was not that Dimitri didn’t appreciate his proficiency or his mettle, but rather that it looked frightening to him in the same way it had once frightened Felix, that he didn’t understand why the danger was worth it, couldn’t understand how victory could be that important enough to justify the risk.

.

Time is weighted differently from person to person. He and Sylvain spend an afternoon in the royal gardens discussing this in comfortable, lazy conversation.

“Actually, could you sit down? You’re starting to stress me out.”

Felix ignores him and clips another branch. The magnolias have needed trimming for a while now. The groundskeepers and gardeners had been relieved when he pointed it out to them, asked for a pruning trimmer—as they should be. At this rate, the trees lining the courtyard would grow so tall they’d rival the castle walls.

“What else have you been doing these years?” Felix asks.

Sylvain watches him with a mixed expression before Felix senses that he gives up. He continues snipping and catches Sylvain in his peripheral vision, rubbing ladyfinger crumbs between his fingers, scattering them down for the ants.

“Home,” he says by explanation. “There’s a lot of stuff to take care of in Gautier, just local problems. The cold, the frost, you know how it is. But there’s been a lot of work rehauling trade routes, too.”

“I saw some of that.” A branch falls onto the ground, lined with two now-doomed buds. “Ingrid said it was helping a lot with food shortages in Galatea.”

“Yes, _saints_. It’s changed everything. It’s still a good deal for southern farmers, and we don’t even have to pay premium prices anymore since there’s no more of the changing-of-hands that always delayed shipments pre-unification. Plus, the Royal School of Sorcery’s developments in ice magic are amazing.”

He’s seen the new iceboxes, charmed to keep cold for weeks on end. “They’re very impressive,” he agrees.

“Yeah. Even non-nobles can afford strawberries and peaches now. Isn’t that exciting?”

He supposes.

“But there’s still a lot left to do.” Sylvain stretches, arms and legs pushing out like a child before he re-settles in his chair, content. “His Majesty’s council is in the middle of throwing a fit right now.”

Another branch—this one a little too close to the center. It likely didn’t need to be cut.

“The budget?”

“No, not this time. Have you heard of Dimitri’s ideas for succession?”

A bad cut. The branch tumbles haphazardly to the ground. Felix has to go back and trim away the sharp point.

“Succession? As in heirs?”

“Yes. He was thinking—”

“Isn’t it too early for that?”

Even as he says it, he knows it’s not true. Though the war is over, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll all live indefinitely.

There is a familiar buzz that comes into his ears at the thought. It feels like fluff in his head, like something peeling at the corners of his mind to pull his senses backward, dull him with cotton.

Sylvain seems to have noticed. He continues, “He wants to do something similar to what they do in Morfis.”

Felix has no idea what they do in Morfis.

“In Morfis, there is a test administered to all magic-wielding children. You know how obsessed they are with magical skill. They use these scores to determine succession. The child with the highest score is declared heir. Of course, if something were to happen, they’d go to the child who scored second-highest, then third-highest, then—well, you get it. Are you sure you don’t want to sit down?”

The sun that had been climbing slowly through the course of the afternoon now hangs itself at a blazing height. Felix drops the trimmer and takes a seat across from Sylvain, who pours a cup of tea and pushes it towards him.

“Dimitri wants to test them? There are hardly noble families with children left alive.”

This is the sad truth. Felix assumes their generation would not be qualified for testing, so it would surely be the next generation and on. Many noble families lost their children during the war—certainly more in the Old Empire than the Old Alliance or Kingdom, but the fact still stands.

“No, Dimitri wants to test orphans.”

Faces come immediately to mind. He thinks of Battista and Magdalena. Paris. The last time he was at Barkett House he had kneeled on the ground to clean and dress a scrape on Paris’s knee. His leg had been thin enough that Felix could almost reach around the whole of it with one hand.

“He doesn’t want to do it exactly the same way, though,” Sylvain says. He’s picked up his spoon, refilled his cup, and is now stirring in cream. “Last I spoke with him, he talked about wanting to test children from major orphanages across the country. Of course, I mentioned it would be more convenient to just keep it to Fhirdiad—the next generation can expand the practice, if they want.”

“How old?”

Sylvain stares at him. “The children?” Felix nods. “I don’t know. I don’t think he’s thought up to there yet.”

“They shouldn’t be too young.”

“I agree. All he said so far is that he wanted the tests to focus more on character more than knowledge, though I’m not sure how he’ll accomplish that. Still, Dimitri said that he’d have to meet and know them, but that he’d choose from those with the highest scores to train over the next few years as heirs.” He sets down the spoon with a satisfied clatter. “The council _hates_ the idea.”

Felix can see where Sylvain’s hand has shown in this plan—with a combination of Dimitri’s fondness for orphans and Sylvain’s determination to dampen as much noble power as possible, Felix isn’t surprised by where they’ve ended up.

It feels wild, but plausible. He didn’t think Dimitri would be capable of such an idea, but he has to agree it’s appealing.

“The council can adjust.”

“So you like it too, then?”

Felix shrugs. “Rulers should never be determined by blood over skill. That much is true.”

He thinks of his inheritance and knows that Sylvain is doing the same.

“You should tell Dimitri. He’s been getting a lot of pushback; he’d be pleased to know you think the same way.”

Hearing that pulls at something old, familiar, and painful. Felix snorts.

“I bet.”

They sit there in silence for a few moments.

He takes a sip of the tea—anise. The smell of licorice is overwhelming.

Sylvain has a quality of staring at people that has always made Felix uneasy. He usually accompanies it with a practiced tone, one that reminds Felix of rabbits and snare traps. When he hears Sylvain use it on him, he grips down harder on his cup.

“You know, eight years is a long time.”

“This is true,” he replies.

“You’ve changed plenty in eight years.”

A strange statement. Felix doesn’t like thinking about the years that have passed. They’ve barely felt like years. When he was younger, eight years meant the difference between crying over tripping in rivers and being able to wield a sword with veritable danger. Harmless and dangerous.

Now, there’s no such feeling. He isn’t sure if it’s an effect of aging or if it’s something different. These years, time is unreliable and fog-like. It passes in an instant, winds back and forth, runs parallel with the past. Felix doesn’t feel any different than he did eight years ago because he is both twenty-three, young and frightened in a war, and thirty-one, having tea with one of the most historically irritating but perceptive people he’ll ever know in his life.

Sylvain downs his cup. Felix takes the moment’s pause to brush a rogue ant away from the sweets and off the tabletop.

“Dimitri’s changed plenty in eight years, too.”

This thought is easier to handle—he snorts, feels it roll off him like smoke.

“I’m serious,” Sylvain says, and this time Felix looks at him and sees it’s true. “No one’s been stuck in time. I know you think that sometimes when you look at us, but we’ve all been changing. You need to make sure you’re not just seeing what you want to see.”

Felix has no response for that. He empties his cup and observes the brown grounds left behind, clumping against itself like wet dirt.

.

To the west of Fhirdiad—beginning just outside of the final set of city walls—are the highland moors. They stretch unfettered and wild until their expansive reach cuts off at broken cliffs, the Lion’s Maw edging and gnawing against the North Sea.

He’s spent many years on the moors in his childhood. It was a favorite of Dimitri’s in particular, as he liked to take horses out whenever he felt stifled by his life in the castle and would occasionally invite Felix to come. There was privacy there that they couldn’t find anywhere else—despite the small retinue that would follow respectfully out of earshot—where they would ride and talk, observe the ponies, pick cottongrass to run through their fingers like little brushes. After the war and their return to Fhirdiad, it was one of the only places where he could find peace. Twenty minutes of hard riding took him far enough to where he turned and saw nothing more than flat grasses, heather and heath, misty hills in the distance.

When Felix returns to them again, it’s reassuring to see that they are still as unchanged as ever. Some things are not meant to be so easily moved. The air is still sharp and sweet.

Dimitri seems to be relatively confident as he leads them forward, bucket dangling from his left hand. It swings while they push on.

“They’ve done this before?” Felix asks.

“No, not that I have known. They expressed interest after reading a book about the creatures that live on these moorlands...now that I think on it, I believe it was Battista who convinced the younger children it would be a fun project.”

“That’s not surprising.”

“I agree. Battista is always full of ideas.”

This is the kindest possible way of putting Battista’s wild flights of curiosity. Felix is reminded, immediately, of how he had convinced a few of the youngest children to jump out of low tree branches with him last week, bedsheets haphazardly sewn to their sleeves and shirts, with the goal of attempting flight.

In comparison, wanting to raise frogs is tame.

“This is a strange thing to have interest in.”

“Do you think?” Dimitri asks. “I would have liked to do this when we were younger.”

That thought is a little funny. “We didn’t have the time.”

“No, we did not. But it’s not bad that they do.” His voice takes on a quality that is now familiar.

Felix sidesteps a large rock and bends. They’re at the lip of a small, still pond, shallow and green-brown from swaying networks of pondweeds. Water skimmers jump along the top, legs pressing perfect rectangles into the water surface. Felix has to brush away gnats and mosquitoes as they begin to land on his neck.

He reaches out to slide his hand under the water. It’s chilly in the late winter cold. Frog spawn clumps against itself in jellied colonies. A few dislodge at the disturbance and drift against his fingers.

“Be gentle,” he hears, as Dimitri crouches down to join him. He sets the bucket between them. “They break easily.”

“How do you plan on collecting them?”

“I believe it would be fine to keep them in here.”

“I meant _how_. With our—?”

He cuts off. Dimitri had already dipped both of his hands under the surface, cupped into a half bubble.

He slides it under a clump of frog spawn. It clings to a few loose plants before settling, a mass of black-dotted jelly, into his palms.

“It’s slimier than I expected,” Dimitri reports.

Felix grabs the bucket and fills it with water from the pond. Dimitri reaches over and gingerly, slowly, begins to lower his hands in. He settles the mass against the surface before moving his hands aside.

They watch as it sinks, catches on stalks of dead bulrushes mixed in with the water, bobs slightly, reaches equilibrium.

“Okay,” Felix says. “How many more?”

“The book referenced that only one in fifty of the eggs will make it to hatching. However, that is only in the wild. In a more controlled environment, perhaps we can expect more of them to survive.” Felix sits back on his heels, waits for him to think. “I suppose...we can bring back a few more. I would not want to bring them more frogs than they can handle.”

The way he says it is ridiculous. “How many frogs do you think they can handle?”

“Perhaps one per person.” He lowers his hands back in. “Three, if they were to be particularly adept at frog-rearing.”

“That’s nearly a hundred frogs. Barkett House would need a new wing.”

“Your skills in labor could extend to carpentry, I’m sure.”

“Absolutely not.”

The second batch of frog spawn settles against the first in the bucket. Felix tries to get a count of how many eggs they’ve collected, but it’s impossible. His eyes begin to blur on the mass of black dots. He has a suspicion that this is too many, but he supposes it’s likely the children won’t be able to keep them all alive anyway.

“This should entertain them for a good while or so. They could release them in the spring,” Dimitri says, examining the bucket himself.

“You have a lot of faith that they won’t lose interest.”

“Of course. What’s more interesting than watching a life grow into itself?” He scoops in a bit more water with his hands. It runs down his forearms and wets the cuffs of his sleeves, which he’d bunched up earlier in preparation for their chore.

Felix watches him work until he seems to have deemed it enough to keep the eggs alive and comfortable. He grabs the bucket handle and lifts it—much heavier now than it had been when it was empty—and matches Dimitri in stride as they head back.

.

This is how he’d predicted it would happen—

He would come back. There would be a poorly contained frenzy among his old comrades and the castle inhabitants at large. He’d wake up in the mornings and find one of them standing outside his room, as if on guard and checking to see if he’s fled in the night, before being whisked away for sightseeing or work.

There would be arguments about staying in the castle or finding a place of his own within Fhirdiad—settled, eventually, when he would have to acquiesce to having both an apartment within Castle Fhirdiad like all of the others, in addition to purchasing an older house just outside of the outermost city walls with enough improvement projects to keep him busy for a few years.

Brainstorming and a wild presentation of varied options on roles he can take up to be kept busy—arguments for and against a sedentary life, a position riding back and forth within Old Kingdom cities to collect reports and updates, a life back in council meetings, the occasional position in military and defense advising, hours spent training squires for the King’s Corps, time to spend doing odd-jobs for castle staff and townspeople—the consensus being a combination of the final three.

Dimitri would be made happy, would let Felix know of his happiness, and—with Felix’s presence now secured in a close perimeter around the capital—would redirect his efforts to more pressing matters in his busy life.

Felix is—on most accounts—correct. There are a few surprises.

The most notable? When he returns one night to his house and finds, on the new table, a paper folded into a small square—

_Felix—_

_It took much consulting before I found someone who recognized the blademaker Airo mentioned in your previous correspondence. The man said she was much lauded within his village in Airmid, but concurred that her reputation does not appear to extend beyond Old Empire borders. If you still carry that court sword of her make, I would love to see it (hands off, of course)._

.

The air changes in the courtyard—becoming sharper, more biting—like time is lifting off of them, molting into an overcast sky.

The point of Felix’s sword feints and swivels, the momentum of it switching at the last moment to dig towards Dimitri’s neck. A dull thud when it is met with the shaft of the spear—another when it’s twisted to dig, point-first, into the dirt. Only a fraction of a beat before it’s yanked back out, the force of the movement snapping it back, far back, until Felix’s fingers close around the blade in half-swording form, before he steps back in time to dodge a swipe. All of these moments beautifully coordinated, almost like a dance. A perfect give and take.

Old Gervasius shakes his head. It is a small movement and missed by the two.

In the make of the universe, there was once a moment very similar to this one. It had taken place nearly thirty years ago, with the same players in very different positions—in a time when the old man had been taller and harder and the boys smaller and softer. A conversation had taken place, that had been internalized and brews even now underneath the surface—

“The head and the heart are not to be trusted. They confuse each other and become deceitful. Do you see how you hesitated? This is what comes of overthinking and overfeeling. What are you so afraid of? This is your little playmate. Do you not trust him? Your head and heart remembers when he was defenseless and weak. You think this will make you dangerous to him, but it will not.”

“Rise. Again. Instinct will not fail you, though you both fear it. This is something you must learn.”

.

There was a woodcutter in Boramas that felled a massive tree and showed Felix how to read the rings. They pulled off their glove and pointed down at a series of grooves, traced along lines that he could barely make out with his eyes and would never have assumed were special.

“Fires,” they had said, by explanation. They dipped their finger into a light scarring—ribbed dark and pale—tracing it in a jagged arc that followed the whorl of the grain.

“It didn’t burn?”

“It burned.” They trace the scarring again. “Here, too.” Another arc, more twisted. This one had left a small crack in the trunk, enough that when Felix reaches to touch it, he feels the soft of his fingertips push inside. “It burned, but didn’t die.”

Survival is adaptation, he supposes. Like the way trinkets begin to accumulate in both his house in the city and his apartment in the castle, little signs of life. A carelessly tossed shirt against his bed at home, a framed painting of a sunset that Annette gifted him for his birthday earlier in the year. Strange artifacts passed onto him from the children—miniature bowls hollowed out of acorns, simple ink drawings of what he’s been told but isn’t entirely convinced are of him, rocks that they had found pretty. Messy stacks of training plans for the squires on his desk, a few that have slipped off and half-under his chair. Half-written letters, newly opened letters, ink blotches soaked so deep into wood that they’re now impossible to get out.

It’s been a year before he even realizes. Time had taken on a strange quality, reclaimed some of the elasticity when he was little. It still isn’t as fluid as when he was young, back before it learned how to double back on itself and lodge him tightly in memories and specific dates. Instead, it almost feels as if it sprints forward with reckless abandon—carelessly swiping ice off buildings, nudging the sun lower to the earth, snatching leaves off trees all in one breath.

It could afford to move slower, he thinks. He wouldn’t mind if it did.

.

It comes with a series of warnings like alarm bells.

“Your Majesty will soon approach you with good intentions,” Dedue says, severe in the way that Felix has recognized is only reserved for him, for when he’s been deemed likely to step out of line in the way he supposes he’s prone to. “When he does, I hope you’ll take this as advanced notice to be understanding of him and his reasons, despite any reactions you may find yourself having.”

Felix pauses, filled with questions.

“When?” he decides, as a starting point.

“Within the next week. You’ll do well to anticipate it.”

“I see. And what are his ‘good intentions’ about?”

Dedue’s facade is so carefully perfected that it rivals only Dimitri’s. Still, Felix thinks he may catch some tightness in the corner of his mouth.

“You will see, soon enough.”

“If this is supposed to be a warning, I’d like a little more information.”

Dedue had shaken his head. In another conversation an hour later—Ingrid running into him in the North Court with a little too much bravado for it to be pure coincidence—he tries to pry for a bit more.

“Just be _nice_ to him,” she finally snaps, after very carefully dodging half an hour of questioning.

“Sure,” Felix says, impatient. “But you and Dedue are making this sound—”

“It’s nothing extravagant! Well—okay—it may be, in your terms. With your track record, I can’t say I’m confident you won’t want to turn and run. No—I don’t mean like that. It will be fine. Just be _kind_ , even if you’re overwhelmed.”

“Overwhelmed? By what?”

Ingrid grabs at the topiary between them with great force. A branch snaps off in her hands, which she throws into the basket of trimmings by Felix’s feet.

“Maybe we should have just left it as a surprise, but I wanted to give you some type of warning since I was worried you’d panic. But you know now.”

“I don’t actually know anything,” Felix reminds her. “How many people are in on this?”

“Well, I only know because His Majesty came to me for advice. He mentioned that he went to Dedue, but he always goes to Dedue—I don’t know if there’s anyone else. Maybe Sylvain? Well, his judgement isn’t exactly the best for situations like this...”

It is only by sheer force of will that Felix manages to bite back the shout, _Situations like what?_

“It’s nothing serious,” Ingrid finally says, after another half-hour of talking that seems to have had a calming effect on her and an agitating effect on Felix. He can now visualize everything between a mildly uncomfortable conversation to a bitter fight to the death, both somehow under the guise of _good intentions_. “A kind gesture from someone that cares about you. Just think of it as that.”

He manages to catch Sylvain right as he’s leaving for the march.

“Of course I know about it,” Sylvain says. His eyes had brightened the moment Felix had come into view—surely somehow sniffing out Felix’s apprehension as fodder for his own entertainment. “I overheard Dedue talking to His Majesty about it. You say Ingrid knows too? Exciting stuff.”

“Okay. Then—”

Sylvain has the audacity to lay his hand over his heart. “But it’s not good if I say anything. This surprise was a long time coming. It wouldn’t be right.”

What wouldn’t be right is if Felix forcefully dragged Sylvain from his horse, tied him to a tree, and sat there staring until he professed all of his knowledge, along with an earnest and moving apology for choosing his own entertainment over Felix’s sanity.

“I don’t have time for this,” Felix says. He channels as much authority as he can—the voice that he’s developed from all these years, deep and worldly. “If the only information you can give me is that I’m going to hate it, then I’m leaving.”

“What, this conversation or the city?” Sylvain jokes.

Clearly, there is no straight answer to be had from any of them. He must prepare for the worst.

.

Despite his dramatizing, he knows that Dimitri’s _good intentions_ likely wouldn’t result in anything dangerous or unideal more than it would force him to suffer great embarrassment. His only stipulation of this embarrassment is that it isn’t public.

“Do you have something to say to me?” Felix asks, around bundles of firewood, on an afternoon when they’re the only ones in the halls right outside the kitchens.

Dimitri looks up from his papers. He frowns. “I don’t believe so?”

They nearly collide at a washroom the next day.

“Oh—” Dimitri says, grabbing Felix’s shoulders to keep them from slamming into each other.

“If you have any business with me, I’m free now,” Felix says.

“Oh? No, I—” He stares at the door beside them.

Felix—in an act that he considers quite charitable—leaves him be.

Unfortunately, this behavior is suspicious enough that Dimitri does, finally, lean into him during dinner that night, raising his goblet between his mouth and the rest of the table so that his words can’t be read by anyone else.

“Am I forgetting something?” he asks, brow furrowing.

“What?” Felix asks, voice muffled by potatoes. He looks around the table for the salt. When he finds it, he passes it over.

“Thank you, but no,” Dimitri says, taking and placing it down by his plate. “I mean to ask if we arranged a meeting for you to speak with me about something. I may have forgotten.”

An awkward question. Felix hurries to swallow, but his mouth is too full. “No, we haven’t.”

“I see. I’ve misunderstood.”

A little, but not entirely. He swallows all his potatoes but does it so forcefully that his eyes tear up. He can tell Dimitri looks a mix of concerned and confused when he goes for his own water to clear his throat.

“I’ve spoken with—” His throat still hurts. He coughs, but the pain doesn’t dislodge. “—Dedue. And Ingrid. And Sylvain.”

He takes another break to cough with the intention of continuing, but it seems that won’t be necessary. Dimitri’s expression breaks, very quickly, into one of acute horror. His face burns a bright red, blotching in his cheeks.

“Sylvain? Sylvain knew?” he whispers.

“He overheard you.”

A polite cough from further down the table—a magistrate from Daphnel. “Are you alright, Your Majesty?”

“Quite fine, thank you for your concern.”

Dimitri drinks, for a particularly extended time, from his goblet. The conversation continues around them. By the time he sets it back down, the red has receded to his neck and his ears and Felix has finally soothed away the sear in his throat.

“You have to understand,” he starts, in a tone that immediately makes Felix brace himself. “It is nothing more than a small sign of appreciation for our many years of friendship. The reason for my hesitation is because Dedue mentioned that it may be uncomfortable for you, which is why I also consulted with Ingrid. It is no big matter.”

He goes for another drink, but his goblet is empty. Felix has figured it out.

“It’s a present.”

The red threatens to creep back up onto Dimitri’s chin.

Felix immediately feels exhausted. Still, it’s not nearly as bad as he expected, not with the huge deal that the others were making.

“I’ll tell you after dinner,” Dimitri says, and truly refuses to say any more on the matter.

.

After excusing themselves from the small cabinet room, they take the winding stairs in the portrait gallery to reach the upper landing. Dimitri leads him towards the left, into the Solar.

Surprisingly, the Solar looks largely unchanged from what Felix had remembered from his youth. He’d only ever entered the antechamber for the occasional intimate lunches and dinners between their families, but he recognizes instantly the royal blue curtains and phenomenally tall arched windows, the way the ceilings soar so high that they dip deep into flickering shadows from the fireplace. He’d learned a long while ago that Cornelia had burned all the old furniture in the room, charred the stone so black that it had to be replaced and restored. Even when he looks carefully now, he can find no remaining signs of this damage.

Though the Solar—or the antechamber, at least—feels the same as he’d remembered it in the past, it is clearly well-loved by Dimitri. One side of the room has been refitted with a series of bookcases, filled to the brim with volumes that Felix wonders how Dimitri finds the time to read. There are marks of the children in his room as well, in little dried flower crowns hung carefully to the side of the mantle, stacks of paper on a low table with the wobbly lettering typical of young children just learning to write, reports of examination results. A glass tea set sits on a side table, eye-catchingly plain for his status, but that Felix assumes was chosen for the ability to showcase how transparent chamomile petals grow when they’re steeped.

“What kind of present is this?” Felix asks, voice kept as level as he can manage. He doesn’t remember Dimitri being much of a gift-giver at any point in their lives. Even his favors had been very reactive—new gloves when Ashe’s thinned to holes, tomes of magic when Annette complained of not knowing some magical theory, pulled from his late-night perusals in the Garreg Mach library. He isn’t sure what it is about the post-war years that seems to have changed this aspect of him.

“I admit it’s hard to explain,” Dimitri says. He’s moved to a large, deep red double-armoire in the corner of the room and has laid a hand on the side of it, hesitating.

Felix sizes it up. Given the distance of his house from the castle, it surely wouldn’t be fun to carry that back. He’s not even sure he has the room for it.

“I have time.”

Dimitri shakes his head. “I think it may just be simpler for me to give it to you. Would that be fine?”

“Okay,” Felix responds, with resignation. He begins to fold up his sleeves. “That’s fine.”

Dimitri nods. To Felix’s surprise, he does not ask Felix to grab the other end and help him lift—instead, he opens the armoire, leaning in to rustle around inside of it. It takes him a moment, but he soon re-emerges with something that he then sets into Felix’s hands.

A small leather box. Very elegantly made, clearly with much skill.

“Thank you,” Felix says.

Dimitri clears his throat. “You’re more than welcome. But you may want to thank me after you’ve opened it.”

That does make more sense. He finds the clasp, presses it open it to reveal an enormous ochre pearl sitting in black velvet. The air around it hangs still with strange energy. When Felix tips it out to cradle it into his palm, he can feel the inborn magic in him resonate in response.

“A touchstone,” Dimitri explains. “Have you heard of them?”

He has, very sparsely. "They're very rare." To his knowledge, only the most skilled alchemists and magic scholars can create touchstones from normal pearls—and even then, it is after months of work on end. He’s never seen one this large before, big enough to be mistaken for a bird’s egg.

He tests it with his magic—pours in a small dose.

His action gives the touchstone heat. It begins to beat like a little heart. He can feel how it recognizes him now, froths his energy back into itself like a small storehouse, ready for him to make a withdrawal at any time.

“I thought it may assist you with your health. I know you’re very busy, I am sure you must be frequently fatigued.”

Felix doesn’t remember telling Dimitri that he has been fatigued. Nonetheless, it’s an astounding gift. There may be no more than a dozen small touchstones in circulation amongst Crest bearers. This may be the only one of its size.

“How in the world did you get your hands on this?”

A small smile that Felix almost misses. Dimitri shakes his head. “Of all people with the ability to acquire rare artifacts, you would doubt a monarch?”

A response that does not respond, at all, to Felix’s question. In time, he will learn that Dimitri had purchased the pearl from a jeweler’s guild himself, sent it off as a commission to a famed mage in Morfis.

Dimitri reaches back into the armoire with intention—“Saints,” Felix mutters, curling his fingers around the touchstone. “Is there more?”

“You agreed to a gift,” Dimitri says, mildly.

“Yes—one—not—”

He has to slip the touchstone back into its box, set it on a table in time to reach out and receive a paper-wrapped bundle.

He unwraps it with one hand—a soft, durable, wyvern-skin bag.

“This bag is crafted from the skin of desert wyverns from Sreng. It will be tough enough to last you for many years, and the make is unique in that it will not allow any water to pass through. I hope that it may serve you well.”

Felix opens it to see inside. Its size is the perfect balance between practicality and portability. He grabs it from two ends and gives it a firm tug. It catches on itself nicely, stretching only enough to keep from tearing.

“Thank you,” he says. He runs his thumb over a brass clasp on the front. “This will be useful during the rainy seasons. I’d never heard of desert wyverns before.”

“I had not, either, until recently,” Dimitri says, with a softer gaze. “I am glad that you like it.”

“I do. This, and the touchstone. You know I appreciate practical gifts.”

“Of course.” To Felix’s horror, he turns back to the armoire.

“More?”

Dimitri turns back around, this time with a long, capped pendant threaded on a thin chain. When Felix looks closer, he can see some viscous substance within.

He watches as Dimitri gingerly untwists the cap, daubs some against the tips of his index fingers.

“May I?” he asks, after re-capping the pendant and reaching forward, palms up in request.

Felix is too tired to do anything other than concede. He registers, at the back of his mind, that this is surely the closest they’ve come in proximity to each other in years. He does his best to keep it from registering plainly on his face—stares back as he feels Dimitri’s fingertips press against the skin on his temples.

He soon loses the veneer of indifference. A cooling, soothing sensation spreads out from the salve, rooting deep and relieving a headache he didn’t even realize he had.

“What is _this_?” He reaches for the pendant to look at it closer, ignoring Dimitri’s grin.

“There’s an excellent apothecary who lives four days’ ride out of the city. She does not often dispense of her medicines so readily, but she agreed when she heard of our history. This salve is a very particular balm she developed for headaches. This is also from her.”

He holds out a little white case, decorated simply with fine-gold detailing. Felix opens it to see a collection of little indigo spheres.

“These are maypop candies,” Dimitri explains, helps Felix hold the pendant as he uses his newly-freed hand to examine one closer. “They have wonderful effects on your sleep. I find that I sleep much deeper, and with much fewer nightmares, when I take two of these candies before bed. I would be curious to hear if they have the same effect on you.”

Something about this gift makes Felix’s chest burn. He doesn’t know if it’s from Dimitri’s admission of frequent nightmares, or the fact that he had somehow known Felix experiences the same.

“Thank you. I’ll let you know.”

“Please do. Now—”

He turns back to the armoire, leans in even further. Felix, feeling as if his brain is still mucking along in even understanding what is happening, very mechanically sets aside the trinkets in his hands in preparation for the next.

Thankfully—for his sanity—there are only three more. A re-bound original manuscript of _The Collected Adventures of Loog, King of Lions_ (“This was the book we used to read in your bed at night when we were first learning our letters—do you remember? It even includes _Loog and the Western Pirates_! I realized from re-reading it that I have misremembered much of the tale.”); a simple knife with silver detailing of olive leaves along the hilt and blade (“The black steel should remain reliable for many years to come. I am sure you will find many uses for it.”); and a very strange pair of socks (“Is this _supposed_ to look like a demonic beast chewing off my legs?”—“Nonsense, Felix.”—“This is meant to be a joke? Confirm or deny.”—“I haven’t the slightest idea what you mean.”).

.

It’s not until he retreats to his house that he realizes he never received a clear explanation for the deluge of presents. Still, it’s not too hard to guess.

He sits them on his nightstand and, after taking two of the maypop candies and laying himself down in bed, stares at their silhouettes in the moonlight. He’s had a guess, pressing at the back of his mind from the moment he’d left the castle. It had grown as he reassessed each of the gifts, had solidified into hesitant surety when he ordered them into a line and counted them.

Seven. One for each Yuletide he’s missed.

It is a very bold theory. The weight of even the slightest possibility of it being true weighs down his tongue, stuns his head into silence. It calls to mind a near-impossible mental image—of Dimitri, sitting in Fhirdiad in the months leading up to Yuletide, musing over gifts, drawing up hopeful plans, tucking them away after the day passes, nursing a growing collection of items, year after year, for someone that had given no signs of returning.

It’s fortunate that there is space in that final moments between wakefulness and sleep, with the bitterness of maypop on his tongue, that it becomes easier for Felix to accept and believe the notion that these seven presents may truly resemble seven quiet years of sentiment.

.

A flip. A king.

“Do it slower,” Magdalena orders. Her face is pressed so close to the cards in his hands that he can barely see them past her hair. She smells of bergamot, from the soaps stocked in Barkett House.

Battista nudges against her arm. “Move, Magda, I can’t see.”

She scoots aside, only marginally.

Felix flips the card. A king. Pauses—flips it back into the deck. The “same” flip again—an ace.

Battista squeezes in a little closer, narrowing his eyes. Paris is sitting on the ground a distance away, watching them with exhaustion.

“Can we do something else now?” he asks. He’s surrounded by little spindly pieces of grass. As Felix watches, he reaches out and tears another blade from the ground, starts to split it down the center. It breaks off at the side and coils tightly against itself.

The other two ignore him.

“I think I’ve almost got it,” Battista says.

“Can I see the cards?” Magda asks, holding her hands out.

“That would defeat the purpose,” Felix says.

“No, I just want to make sure!”

“If you do it one more time, I’ll be able to get it,” Battista says.

Magdalena frowns at him. “What is it then?”

“It’s cheating if I tell you.”

“Are you not bored of this yet?” Felix asks.

Magdalena shakes her head. Battista sits back on his heels.

“The trick happens after you put the first card back, right before you flip it the second time,” he says. “You switch the first card with the other card that’s right under it.”

Felix remains impassive.

Battista crosses his arms, smug. “I’m right.”

He’s not.

“Does this mean we can do something else?” Paris asks.

“Yes—”

“May I make a guess?” Dimitri says.

While Magdalena and Battista had been tripping over each other to get a better look, Dimitri had been watching from over his shoulder. He gives Felix no time to respond before continuing.

“There is no switch at all. You pick up two cards the first time but disguise it so it appears there is only the one. The top card is the ace, the second is the king.”

Correct, but Dimitri is being deceitful. Felix knows that he can recognize the double lift, especially considering Felix had just taught it to him two weeks ago. Nonetheless, he keeps his face impassive.

“Is he right?” Magdalena asks.

“I don’t know,” Felix says. He shuffles the cards—despite Magdalena and Battista’s protests—and tucks them away.

.

Usually asked quietly—with the muted shame from knowing of its tastelessness, of knowing how socially inappropriate it is to speak of the subject for curiosity and not necessity:

_What is it like to kill someone?_

A forbidden question. Something that demarcates a line between those cursed with knowledge and those that morbidly crave it:

_How long does it take a person to die?_

Blindingly painful in its innocence. Asked sometimes by the orphans that work to bear the weight of what it means to live as a tree over a forest, cut from lineage, who need to know death to know their lives:

_Do you think it hurts to die?_

To lie, he would say this:

“It depends. Sometimes it’s easy. There are more painless ways to do it. There are more painful ways to do it. Once I watched a flyer struck by an arrow fall onto a tree, bleed till the trunk was dyed red to the earth. But there’s also a squire that had an excellent day on the training field, who went wading through a river with his friends, attended a banquet, got so drunk that he was singing on tabletops, and never woke up from his sleep.”

To speak truthfully, he would say:

“You ask these questions out of fear for your own life, or out of fear for the lives of those you care about. This is not fear that can be assuaged without lies, and I dislike lies. I can’t tell you that you will never die, nor can I tell you that everyone you care about lives forever. There is no form of redemption for those who cross the line, and there is no glory to be had in crossing it.”

To Battista, Magdalena, and Paris, he says:

“This fear will never go away. There is no dismissing it, but you are wasting your time. You don’t have time to fear death—save your fear for the dangerous. Fear people like me and your king, who did not stop after the first life we ended. Fear every reason and rationale given to you for killing. Fear the usage of words like _duty_ and _honor_. Fear people who know the truth and hold no remorse, and do not believe what they say. There is nothing more horrible than taking a life. There is no penance for this act. But I say this to you knowing that there’s a chance you will all kill. If any of you three take up the position as heir, it would be inevitable. You will have goals and dreams—this is all fine. But being dangerous means fighting, constantly, to retain your humanity. The people most dangerous of all are the ones that don’t know they’re dangerous. You will not become one of them.”

To Dimitri, he wishes he could say:

“I’m tired, too. Keep going. When we reach the end, tell me what you thought of it all.”

.

In the courtyard, the fight comes to an end.

A lethally quick turn, blade caught between both of his hands, cross guard pitching down into a murderstroke right for the crown of Dimitri’s head. Fast and with enough force to do catastrophic damage, even given the relative lightness of their training weapons.

The spear clatters to the ground, discarded. In that time—Dimitri’s hand shooting upwards, seizing the grip, stopping it just as it brushes against his hair—wrenching it out of Felix’s hands and reversing the momentum as he flips the sword and slams the pommel hard against Felix’s solar plexus, right as Felix’s fist snaps forward and lands, squarely, on his nose.

Twin cries of pain. The sword hits the ground, met quickly with a few drops of deep red as Dimitri pitches his head forward to keep the blood from dripping down his neck. Felix is mute, gasping, doubled over with a hand pressing over quickly bruising skin.

A pause.

“Better,” Old Gervasius finally mutters.

“What?” Dimitri asks, sounding dazed.

“Minutely better.”

“Minu—” Felix wheezes, enraged, but can’t make it any further.

“What do you want me to say? I am no longer your instructor. You have both long progressed past any skill that I hold myself. I can only speak on your spirit, not your technique.”

The blood begins to soak into Dimitri’s shirt in sparse dots. Felix has since collapsed onto the ground, limbs splayed and chest heaving, as he attempts to regain control of his breath. Old Gervasius swats at a fly with his hand, which ignores him.

“Do you have any observations of our spirit, then, Sir Gervasius?”

Old Gervasius reaches out to pull at his beard, running strands through his fingers.

“What type of observations, little king?”

“Any. We have always appreciated your wisdom.”

“It may not be welcome.” He sighs. The fly lands on his knee. “You are both completely unchanged from before. Always so fierce with others and so cowardly with each other. I never understood it.”

Felix has since quieted down. His eyes stare vacantly up at the blue sky above them. Dimitri sits on the ground, sleeve bunched up against his nose.

“I see.”

“Do you? Over the years, you have both told me many times that you understand, but you always return to the same patterns.”

“I do understand,” Dimitri says. He pulls the sleeve away for a brief to examine the amount of blood on it before pressing it back. “I understand, theoretically.”

“Oh? And you, little Fraldarius?”

A grunt.

Old Gervasius chortles.

“Well said.” He shakes his head. “I have no new advice for you. I have said this all before. Do not be so afraid of the power you hold over each other. You must trust that this is not someone you can so easily break.”

.

Dimitri closes out his afternoon meeting nearly an hour after its scheduled end time. Felix, having grown bored of waiting at the door for them to finish, long completed a quick trip to the kitchens to swipe a basket of herb buns. When he comes back, he finds the councilmembers dismissed and Dimitri scanning papers over with a magistrate, the left corner of his mouth pinched into a knot that only releases when the magistrate bows to leave and he finally accepts an herb bun.

“I take it you don’t have time to visit Barkett House today.”

“Unfortunately not.” He begins to tear at the bread with his fingers, brings the steam up to his nose. “It appears to be one of those days where our country is on the brink of imploding. You may want to make preparations.”

“What is it this time?”

“Guild fees in Enbarr.” Dimitri takes a measured bite. “Is there tarragon in this?”

“I have no idea. Shouldn’t they have gone to Caspar for problems with guild fees?”

“Oh, trust that they did. Unfortunately, the many injustices suffered by the ironworking guild appear to be too vast to be handled by the Minister of Adrestia himself.”

“Really.”

“They were very convinced of a need to come here to speak their piece. If you happen to be curious, you could find them to ask about it yourself. I’m sure they’d be happy to show you their forty-three page document—very effortfully compiled, I can say.”

“I don’t have nearly enough patience for that.”

Dimitri pulls a face of agreement. Felix would be lying if he said he wasn’t entertained. He passes another bun to Dimitri and breaks open another one to smell for himself—he has no idea what tarragon even is, to be honest.

“If you are still going to Barkett House today,” Dimitri says, “Let them know that I should have the time to come at the end of the week. If they happen to have any requests for gifts—”

“I can get a list,” Felix says, even though the mere thought of it threatens a headache. From the moment they crossed over into Yuletide season, it’s as if the children have been on alert. Magdalena had been begging for a full battle hammer for what feels like years now. He can already imagine her carefully planned ten-point argument for how she is not too young to start on real weapons, what with her turning twelve in the coming months. Those guildmasters could learn from her persistence and thoroughness.

“You started on sharp blades long before you were ten!” had been her latest argument.

“Out of necessity, not out of choice.”

“Noble children are still being started at that age!”

“Are they?” he’d said, forcing as much indifference as he can manage despite knowing that he, in the end, will likely cave. “They shouldn’t be.”

Dimitri leans forward to glance into the basket. Felix tilts it to show that there are no more, watches as he sits back with the faintest disappointment.

“Though I already suspect we know what gifts some of them are hoping for,” he says, confirming Felix’s suspicions that he, too, is thinking about battle hammers. “It’s still good to check. It would allow me to make some last-minute changes, if necessary.”

“You’ll be able to see how many you guessed right.”

Some light comes back into Dimitri’s face.

Felix recognizes it immediately and braces himself accordingly.

“You know, old friend, there’s some enjoyment for us to be had in this work as well.”

“What do you mean?”

“Would you like to make a game of it?”

He narrows his eyes. “Of the gifts?”

“Precisely. We’ll see who can more accurately gauge the whims of the children.” Felix can see him thinking, buoyed by childish excitement. “We will each draw up a list of what we think each child would want. After you obtain an accurate list from them, we will go back through and check to see who had been more exact.”

“You’re at an advantage. I’ve only known them for a year or so.”

“Oh, but you’ve spent quite a bit of time with them in the past few months.” Dimitri waves a hand. “Very personal time. Are you to convince me that you’ve retained nothing from it all?”

It’s a losing fight. He knows that Dimitri can tell, with that smug glint entering his eye.

“Taunting looks bad on you,” he says, as severely as possible.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Dimitri responds. “But I understand your concerns about fairness. Given our history and my knowledge of how dearly you hate to lose—”

Felix coughs.

“—Perhaps a handicap is in order?”

“I don’t need a handicap,” he says immediately—which does, a few hours later, lead to his downfall. He starts tapping his foot on the floor. “The punishment for the loser?”

“Oh, Felix. Are we not too old for that?”

Absolutely not. Now it’s his turn.

“If you win, I will allow you give me the Yuletide present you’ve definitely already acquired, against my wishes.” Dimitri snorts, but doesn’t deny it. “If I win, you must destroy it.”

“Well. I will say it’s in your best interest to reconsider. It is a good present.”

“You can give it to me and I’ll throw it off the Lion’s Maw for you,” Felix confirms.

This gets a laugh out of him.

“Then I suppose I’m in agreement.”

.

Of the boxes of letters in his house, there is one that he does not usually open. It holds most of the letters exchanged, throughout the years of his life, with his father. The dust accumulated on the lid at this point is sure to be so thick that Felix feels he may as well not disturb it.

There is something funny about growing older. It is not something that he thinks about consciously—the number of years that he has accumulated—but he is reminded of it through some conversations with the children. He understands that, to them, the notion of him having been a child once is a fascinating one.

“And you were friends with His Majesty ever since you were little?”

“Ever since I was born.”

“Wow,” Battista says. For the first time in his life, Felix sees him stunned. “That’s...a really, really long time ago.”

Felix snorts.

“What were you like when you were little?”

“I was like a child.”

Magdalena crosses her arms. “That’s not an answer!”

But it is. “I was very stubborn,” he says, and looks pointedly at Magdalena. “Dimitri was very stubborn, too. He had gotten used to getting his way from being the crown prince. We used to get into many fights. Our fathers would have to mediate between us.”

“You had a father?”

The question is so abrupt and ridiculous that he can’t help but laugh. He understands, of course. To them—especially to Magdalena and Paris, being much younger than Battista—he could imagine that they would struggle to imagine him as anything other than an adult.

But how difficult it was, the journey into adulthood. He knows now that there is no way that he can convince them, with surety, how naive he had once been, how many times he had argued childishly with his father, how he had spent whole letters telling him off for convincing him to attend the Officer’s Academy, as if he would encounter any knowledge worth knowing or any people worth remembering. It has the same quality of when his father had tried to tell him of his own childhood, the way he had emphasized his words to make Felix believe something he could fundamentally never—

“I was quite a rulebreaker. Or Lambert was, at least, and I tended roped into his tricks. It was all generally harmless fun, of course. But there were a few times that we would steal mead from the kitchen stores, for the fun of it, and test our alcohol tolerance out on the moors.”

The thought is also sobering. It reminds him how long ago it had been, truly, since he was very small and carried in his father’s arms, from meeting to meeting, because of his refusal to be separated. Since the days that Rodrigue would pull up a chair by his bed and read him stories until he fell asleep, would open his wardrobe to check for beasts.

He knows that it had not been easy. He sits by children’s beds, now, until his back hurts and he has long grown hungry, watches them and thinks of when their positions were once reversed and he had been the one drifting off to sleep, warmed in a little cocoon of blankets with the comforting knowledge that there was a guardian watching over him.

He does miss his father, sometimes.

He is not sure if that child is lost, now, or if he is simply there in a different form. There is a cyclical nature to this work that he does not mind. He does know, without being asked, to check under the bed and in wardrobes for beasts.

.

The frog spawn spurs a disaster.

Felix supposes that he and Dimitri would not have been able to predict that nearly _every_ egg would hatch and that the children would take to trading frogs between them like buttons and marbles and that frogs are just a little too slippery and fast for all of them to catch and that they would soon take to hiding in places so small and cramped that everyone would quickly lose track of how many frogs there were in which rooms and who was in charge of which frog until, ultimately, Barkett House rings with the deafening and persistent sound of frog calls through all hours of the day.

Felix stands, crouched, listening very intently, parsing through the cacophony of frog calls in the orphanage with the hopes of determining if there are any additional frogs in his current room.

The door opens. The headmistress pokes her head in, massive bags under her eyes.

“His Majesty is taking out another batch with the children to the pond,” she says, voice strained. “Do you have any to add?”

Felix lifts a covered basket by his feet, which croaks in protest.

“Thank you,” she says, taking and holding it out in front of her like it is diseased. “How many are in this one?”

“Five.”

“That makes forty-two,” she mutters. “Saints help us.”

He does not ask how many frogs there are in all, if they had even had the opportunity to count them before they grew legs and began hopping about. Instead, he crouches back down and decides, finally, that there is likely one more frog in this room with him.

This ordeal with frogs takes two full days of careful frog-hunting to resolve.

“Perhaps this was not the best idea,” Dimitri says, when they’ve both returned to the castle and are slumped in chairs in the Inner Court, too tired to lift their teacups.

“I never want to look at a frog again in my life,” Felix confirms.

.

Though Dimitri won, he is considerate enough to not force Felix to accept his gift in front of all their friends. That, at least, proves he is not a complete ass. He offers to give it to Felix months in advance.

It feels very familiar—the walk up through the portrait gallery, the turn into the Solar—but is also harder to distinguish, as Felix has made more than a few visits to the Solar in the past few months. It had since become an easy place in the castle for the two of them to fritter away time during breaks or for their friends to convene as a group. Dimitri seems to prefer it more as a gathering space than the other rooms in the castle, as it requires less fuss from the staff. There is an element of it that is nontraditional but, considering everything else about his reign, Felix assumes the court had no choice but to accept it.

Back to the stupid armoire.

“You seemed to be pretty confident about this gift.”

Dimitri, to his surprise, has not been as smug as Felix expected of him. If anything, he looks to be self-conscious, falling into his old patterns of glancing repeatedly at Felix to gauge his reaction while he speaks.

“It was an idea that I have had for a while, but I had previously never found the time to complete it to my standards.”

“You make it sound like you made this.”

The self-conscious glance, again. “In a way.”

Dimitri, to his recollection, has never been very artistic. Felix feels slight apprehension as he watches Dimitri reach in and—pause suddenly.

“I feel it may be most effective as a surprise. Would you mind closing your eyes?”

His apprehension grows.

“Okay,” he says, nonetheless, and closes his eyes.

Noises by the armoire. Whatever Dimitri has collected this time seems to be bulkier, as he hears something hitting against the wood as he assumes Dimitri is maneuvering it out. Another sound—one that he recognizes well.

He is suddenly very, very curious.

“A sword?”

A soft laugh. “Yes.”

“You should have just said it was a sword.”

“Perhaps, but I hoped it would be a surprise. I’m going to place it in your hands, now. It is unsheathed, but the false edge is facing you.”

“Okay.”

He senses Dimitri stepping closer and then—gently—cold metal lowers against his palms.

“You may look.”

He opens his eyes and inhales sharply.

It is not a new sword. In fact, it is not even a unique sword. Felix recognizes it immediately as one of the silver swords that their army had kept as common stock and, specifically, as the one that he had carried with him through most of their battles for its durability between sharpenings, easily recognizable for the chip in the blade near the hilt.

The reason he needed it to be durable, of course, was not a happy one—cutting through flesh and bone was not effortless. He remembers that he’d returned it to the armory immediately after the end of the war and told them that they should melt it down and make it useful.

But it does, now, look like a changed sword. The grip is rewrapped in a white leather, cross guard and pommel polished to a gleam.

Most impressive of all—the blade. Polished and burnished to a perfect, impossible mirror-finish.

Felix lifts it to the light. There is not a single scratch or flaw on either side.

“You did this?” he asks, incredulous.

He looks up. Dimitri is watching him, rapt.

“I did.”

“This took months.”

Dimitri opens his mouth to respond and closes it, smiles instead.

Burnishing, to this caliber, is non-trivial. The first step is finding mineral that would be capable of burnishing a sword of this make—the second is finding enough. The process is so tedious, requires so many careful hours of rubbing stones over the blade at the perfect angle and pressure so as not to scratch the metal, stopping every ten minutes or so to ensure that the stone is still of appropriate shape, that people very rarely do it at all. This does not even take into account the number of rounds it must have taken to bring the blade to this level of clarity. He doesn’t know how Dimitri—of all people to choose for a task so delicate—managed it.

It is dazzlingly beautiful—so beautiful that it can never be used again in its lifetime, not with the immense value that it now holds with this finish. He could never have expected a gift with this level of care.

“What lubricant did you use for the burnishing?”

“I used beeswax.”

“I’m amazed.”

Dimitri’s face breaks into a brilliant smile.

“I am so glad. I remembered that you did not want to keep this sword after the war for all the battles that it carried you through, but I remember this sword fondly. It had saved my life. I hoped that I could convey to you, somehow, that there is still great reason to preserve it, despite its history.”

 _Its history_. Felix knows, with that phrase, that Dimitri is not referring to the battles. He is most definitely referring to one night, in the rain, when Felix had driven it deep into his chest in desperation.

Felix takes the sheath and very, very gingerly slides the blade back into place.

“The meaning is not lost on me. I will keep this for life.”

Dimitri’s smile grows gentle. “That is already more than I can ask for. I had always hoped to myself that it could become one of your beautiful things.”

.

Growing older than Glenn had already been unfathomable enough. The morning he awakens, seventeen and ninety-four days old, he’s surprised the world had not stopped immediately in its tracks.

Most unforgivable about death is the stasis. The way that those gone are held firm by it, the way that life demarcates firmly into a _with_ and _without_ , the quiet of reminiscence that fades from no new memories. It is just as bad to imagine Glenn at thirty-eight as it is to imagine him at seventeen and ninety-three days. Felix does not have the breadth of energy to imagine how he would feel the morning he awakens forty-eight and two-hundred-and-three days old.

These are the thoughts that make it difficult to sit and watch as Paris enters the South Court to murmurs, bows politely, is taken through a series of combative maneuvers under the watchful eyes of the examiners. It is what makes it difficult to watch as Dimitri rises at the end to commend him, lay a hand on his arm to correct his sword form.

There is a moment where the stasis takes hold and Felix sees that hand flash waxy, devoid of warmth—

And then it snaps away. Young again—firm with experience, fingertips full enough to still hold their callouses, grip confident with guidance. Not yet gone.

.

It is only fair that he returns the gesture in kind. Felix waits for the next opportunity—his birthday.

“Dimitri.”

A turn and a smile, warmed from hours of conversation with their old friends.

The box shakes in his hands, his heart still catching up to his decision. He sees Dimitri’s gaze track down to it, his expression grows curious.

A leap of faith. He pushes it into Dimitri’s hands.

There seems to be a moment before it registers.

“Oh? A birthday present from a man who has always so emphatically criticized ritual gift-giving?” Though Dimitri’s tone keeps its teasing edge, Felix can read in his face genuine delight.

There is no pretty way of saying it.

“In the years when I was away,” Felix says, “I’d written you many letters. There were some that I didn’t send.”

A change. Dimitri appears frozen, but his fingers unmistakably tighten around the box.

Felix can feel his face being searched.

“There’s no need,” he says, voice soft.

“It’s my decision.”

“...If you are—”

“I’m sure.”

A sigh. Felix’s eyes track back down to the box. It’s a simple make—dark, wooden, one to a set from a black rosewood tree that he’d crafted himself. He can see in his mind, clearly, the rows of folded paper within—letters dating back eight years, that he’d refused to ever reread for fear that he’d burn them en masse.

“Thank you. I will treasure them.”

.

Ingrid does not usually make this face.

“Just be careful, okay?”

He doesn’t have to ask what she’s talking about. He’s noticed it, too, on the horizon—like the peace before a snowfall, the gathering of silent clouds.

“I trust you two, of course, but—things are nice how they are right now, aren’t they? They’re already so nice, it would be so sad if—” She trails off, the ending of her sentence clear.

“Don’t worry. I feel the same way.”

“I know, but still.”

“Don’t worry.”

“I know. I can’t.”

.

Sword lilies balance so precariously on his head that he must hold on to them with his left hand to keep them from falling over his nose. His other hand is grasped tight in Dimitri’s, growing clammy from the contact.

“Have you ever been in a parade before, Felix?” Dimitri asks.

Felix shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”

“This is your first? What do you think of it?”

He looks around, but it’s hard to see around the sides of the carriage with his height. He wriggles to get a better look, but Queen Patricia sets a hand on his shoulder.

“Careful, Felix. We wouldn’t want you to fall.”

He hadn’t considered the possibility of falling until that moment. Suddenly, there is nothing more terrifying than the prospect of being knocked out of the carriage, being bounced between the hooves of the horses around them, left so far behind that Dimitri and his father and Glenn could not find him.

He clenches back, hard, on Dimitri’s hand. “I don’t want to fall,” he mumbles, scooting on the bench seat until he’s flush against the back.

Dimitri turns to him. When he tilts his head, the elaborate flower crown on his head skews gently over his left eye.

“Don’t worry about falling, Felix. It’s very safe. I have ridden in these open carriages many times before and have never fallen out.”

“Okay,” he says, and tears up, nonetheless.

“Mother and I would never let you fall. Right, Mother?”

“That’s right,” Queen Patricia says. She settles a hand on Felix’s head, adjusts his sword lilies so that they lean at a more stable angle, sliding around just a bit less. “You’re very safe with us.”

“Okay.” The world grows blurrier. He can make out, very vaguely, Dimitri looking up at his mother with concern. He feels Dimitri’s other hand raise to rub, clumsily, at his tears.

Embarrassed, Felix shakes his hand away.

“Even if you fell, Felix, I would jump off and come to find you,” Dimitri says, so persistent in his comforting that he turns and cranes his neck until Felix sees his face, tilted upwards. He brightens when Felix finally makes eye contact. “So there is no need to worry.”

Felix nods and rubs at his nose with his sleeve.

Queen Patricia’s hand smooths over his head again. “Perhaps you can point out something that may be of interest to Felix, my love. Something that may teach him a little about these parades.”

“Yes, Mother,” Dimitri says, nodding, before learning forward to scan the crowd.

Felix watches him, sniffling, assessing how the carriage looks much less scary when Dimitri is moving around with that much confidence. The cheering of the people around them continues, loud in a way he’d never experienced before, almost deafening and chaotic in volume. Single-stemmed flowers land at their feet. Felix is looking curiously at a near-black rose that falls just in front of his toe when Dimitri begins to squeeze harder on his hand.

“Look, Felix!” Dimitri says, pointing out past their carriage into something off in the distance. “Look! Over there.”

.

The first snowflake, a harbinger of the end, that dislodges with silent resolve from its companions in the clouds.

What could he do to stop something that now feels so inevitable?

From Dimitri—direct, sincere, and sorry:

“My love for you has become indecent.”

.

Laughter so loud that it almost echoes in the shallow valley, so that Felix hears the lot of them long before he crests the hill and sees them—the children focused, conglomerated around Dimitri like a giggling, shifting garden, holding flowers and grasses that they tuck behind his ear and throw over him like confetti and try to balance on his head and attempt, futilely, to bind up with sparse strands of his hair. Even from a distance his hair looks so mussed and knotted that Felix doubts he can have it brushed out again without significant pain, his shoulders dusted with pollen and crushed petals and tiny piles of grasses like the forest spirits of legend.

When he turns to acknowledge Felix, some flora dislodges. Groans from the children around him, shouts for him to stay still, a mess of movements as they bend to retrieve all the flowers he’d lost.

“Well done,” Felix says.

Dimitri smiles, wide enough to where it curls at his eye.

“Want to join me?” he asks, whimsical, gesturing to the ground beside him.

.

Felix pulls out the chair and takes a seat, crossing his legs. He watches Dimitri carefully.

“Okay,” he says.

In the castle outside of the Solar, the sounds of the staff settling around for bed—finishing nightly chores, closing windows, blowing out candles. Through the open window, he can hear the jovial shouting of people headed out to drink.

Against his bidding, his mind tallies the score. Ten years, since the war.

How easy it seems, for everyone else.

“...I apologize. I understand how precarious this—”

“You don’t have to explain yourself,” Felix says, because he doesn’t. “I understand your feelings.”

“Do you?”

“Yes. Unfortunately.”

In the silence, the noise from outside seems to amplify, bouncing up the high walls of the antechamber. The laughter begins to take on a mocking edge.

“It’s not your fault,” Felix continues. “I know you didn’t—”

“No,” Dimitri agrees.

“I know you wouldn’t have compromised this. Of your own choosing.”

He smiles, flat.

“No. But I am sorry.”

“Thank you for telling me.”

“You do not need to thank me. This is not happy news.”

The silliness of that statement makes Felix snort. “To others, it may be.”

Dimitri’s smile falls. “I suppose,” he says. “But not for me. I had hoped that we could remain close for many years to come.”

There is a quality in his voice that makes Felix’s breaths run shallow.

“I missed being close to you,” Dimitri continues. “I hadn’t realized how much I missed it, until you returned.”

“I see.”

“I did not want to tell you, but I had promised you that I would—I wanted to keep my word of being truthful to you.”

“Mmm.”

“I was afraid you would want to leave again.”

Felix shakes his head, quick. “I won’t leave.”

“Oh—thank you.”

He shakes his head again. “Not because of you—or, I mean—not entirely because of—” He stops. “I don’t know how to say it.”

“I believe I understand.”

It feels as if his lungs are constricting. When he leans back in his chair his mind calls up the images, abstractly, of half-swording and maypop candies. Chicory blooms, the years he’d spent estranged for fear of being seen through by all of them. Old years at the Academy, pink dogwood trees in the Old Empire, Barkett House’s many mismatched curtains. A walk they took, one afternoon many years ago, through his childhood home.

An incomplete, childish thought runs through his head—

_But how unfair._

His voice cracks, against his will, when he asks, “Can you fight it?”

Dimitri’s face takes on an expression he’s never seen before. He can’t tell if it’s sadness or—

“I will. Can you?”

A nod. “My feelings, as I have learned,” he says, clears his throat before continuing, “Are strong, but short-lived.”

“I see.”

“It will pass.”

Dimitri nods. “Good.”

The laughter begins to sound like jeering. Felix rises and crosses the room to the window and closes it shut. The glass is cool against his cheek when he leans against it.

“I am so sorry,” Dimitri says.

“Please stop apologizing.”

“I know that I have put you in distress.”

“You’re distressed, too.”

“Well. Yes.”

He remembers, suddenly, something that almost makes him snort.

“Ingrid warned me against this.”

“What did she say?”

“She said that things were too nice for me to mess it up again. She was ordering me to better restrain my emotions.”

A sigh.

“Our friends do suffer when we fight.”

“Yes.”

“But there will be no fights this time. I do believe that we have learned and grown enough in all of these years to prevent that much.” The slightest hint of mockery in his voice when he continues, “We’re not children anymore, at least.”

The night outside is dark and grainy. It is a full moon, luminous and pale, sitting in its own halo. From Dimitri’s window, Felix can see the gardens and hedges of the North Court casting shadowy, gray pools.

“I am glad you feel the same way,” Felix says, against the glass. It fogs under his breath in changing clouds. “I wouldn’t have known what to do if you’d wanted to pursue it. I don’t think I’m soft enough for it.”

He hears the scraping of a chair.

“Perhaps. But I would never have wanted you to be soft.”

He turns to see Dimitri standing, a hand splayed on his desk, brushing against his inkwell, before he glances up. He looks too tired to smile, unwilling to pretend for any longer.

“I am in the mood for a walk, to clear my head,” he says. “Would you like to join me?”

“I would have thought you’d want to be free of me to clear your head.”

“Being with you does clear my head...generally. If we speak of easier things, I trust that our hearts will moderate themselves on their own.”

He makes a few strides to the door, opens it to the darkness of the halls outside, looks back until their eyes lock. His voice, when he continues, is so quiet that Felix nearly misses it.

“I would like to walk that quiet path in the garden, by the fountain. If you were willing, I would love to hear more on what you taught Paris this week in swordplay.”

.

This is how the portrait gallery in Castle Fhirdiad is structured:

A cavernous room, spanning up both floors of the castle, that from the bottom look like a path up into uncertain darkness and, from the top, looks like a fall back down to mortal earth. Wide, stone stairs that line the walls in straight lines, held intermittently by white columns, that cause for the loudest echoes of footsteps in the castle when climbed.

Along all the flat surface on the walls, dozens upon dozens of portraits. Painted in old styles, newer styles, bright colors, dull colors—all of them cast in such darkness at night that they become an ominous sea of faces, made lively in the morning from the sunlight that streams through the enormous windows, life brought back to the colors on their clothes and in the painted irises of their eyes.

All of them ordered, in very rough clumps, by ancestral lineage. Loog at the top of the room, hand on his sword, ink-black eyes commanding; Lambert at the foot of the stairs aside Odelle, Patricia, Rufus. Many of them blond and blue-eyed, many of them not. Through the main lineage, little commonalities can easily be found on their faces, like persistent ghosts from the past—sharp jawline, hooded eyes, higher brow, thin upper-lip.

Dimitri’s, as a member of the current, reigning family, is the only one presented at the bottom of the room, directly across from the double-doors. His portrait looks like it was painted soon after his coronation, sitting at an angle in his chair, dressed extravagantly in blues, golds, and blacks. The background is dim, the blue in his eye bright. There is the subtlest, faintest hint of a smile on his face, visible only in the softness of his gaze.

There are already some minor differences between this idealized portrait and the Dimitri that he knows. The painting is now missing the lines against his mouth, the beginnings of crow’s feet at his eyes. It is a strange exercise to look at the painting. More so than when he looks at the person, Felix can see the hints of the child he’d once been—there, in the roundness of his cheek.

Through the walls, he can hear the bustling in the Great Hall, orders being given, tables and chairs being rearranged for the announcement and presentation of the final, selected heirs-in-training. If he were to climb the stairs and stand outside the Solar, he knows he’d be able to hear the low murmur of Dimitri’s voice in conversation with the children—Paris’s dubious questioning coupled with the loudness Magdalena’s voice takes on when she grows excited, Battista’s uncharacteristically sober silence. Fortunately, he has no interest in muddling in their state affairs and is more than content to remain at the bottom of the gallery, listening to and absorbing, with restraint, the general excitement in the castle.

He does not have long to wait.

He hears the slamming of the doors and the rushing of footsteps before they come into view. Magdalena and Paris come down first—their little faces scrubbed clean, in clothes so starched and formal that they move with an uncertain mutedness in their step, hair cleaned and bound up in simple ties—sweeping past portraits of previous monarchs like little tornados. Dimitri and Battista follow, still in conversation—Battista’s hair down in curls around his face, his expression relatively unhappy.

Magdalena approaches first, beaming. “Felix! King Dimitri says I’m going to be a princess!”

“Congratulations,” Felix responds.

“If I’m a princess, that means that I can have a battle hammer, right? I’m considered nobility now, right?”

He both marvels at her tenacity and mourns his position on the receiving end of it.

“We can discuss it later.”

“Why not now?”

Paris shuffles up, wriggling his neck repeatedly around his high collar. “You’re not a princess yet. You have to be presented first, then you can be a princess.”

Magdalena frowns. She looks back up to Felix, hopeful. “Okay. Then we can talk about it after I’m presented? Before we eat? Or during?”

As the seating arrangements for dinner have already been decided—and as he knows there’s no way for him to escape the high table—he supposes they will.

“The court may be prepared to receive us now,” Dimitri says. He’s wearing a new midnight blue cloak with fine, gold embroidery along the edges—winding patterns spindling off from Blaiddyd crests—pinned and tucked partially over his left shoulder. He greets Felix with a small smile, which Felix returns. “Are you three ready?”

“Do we have to _do_ anything to be ready?” Battista mumbles.

“I’m ready,” Magdalena says. She is the only one that bounces, just slightly on her toes, as the group of them step out of the portrait gallery and into the hallway, turn to face the looming doors of the Great Hall.

The guards stationed at the door, upon their entry, bow deeply.

“Your Majesty. Grandmaster.”

“Are preparations complete?”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

Felix feels a tug on his sleeve and looks down to see Paris. His little figure, dressed in so much regalia, makes Felix’s chest grow tight. Prince Paris with the scraped knees from playing in the fields.

“Am I going to have to stand in front of everyone for a long time?” Paris asks. His expression is smoothed as impassively as ever, but Felix knows him well enough now to detect the slight tremble in his jaw. “King Dimitri says it’ll be fast, but with a lot of people.”

Felix bends to correct his collar, which had somehow folded over itself with all his squirming. “There will be a lot of people,” he says, quiet. “They will all look at you. If you stand straight and keep breathing, it will pass quickly. But I will be standing at the right with the castle staff, close to the front. If you feel afraid, look for me.”

“Okay. Are you staying the whole time?”

“I am required to, yes,” he says. Paris nods. Felix thinks quickly. “And you should know—I visited the kitchens before coming. They have a new dessert prepared for dinner that looks like it’s made of a mound of chocolate bigger than your head.”

Paris’s frown deepens. “I have a small head.”

“Bigger than Dimitri’s head.”

“Is it, now?” Dimitri asks, raising an eyebrow. “That would be a sight, wouldn’t it, Paris?”

Paris nods.

“I bet I could eat it all before you,” Battista says, nudging Magdalena, some of his old self coming back.

Her eyes grow fiery. “No! My mouth is bigger.”

She opens it to demonstrate. Battista holds his pinky in it, which she bites.

“ _Ow_! Magda!”

“Serves you right!”

“Be gentle with each other,” Dimitri says.

“Only bite for good reasons,” Felix says. Dimitri throws him a look that he ignores. “Otherwise, it will lose its effect.”

Magdalena nods, throws Battista a glare that seems to cheer him up further. He adjusts the lace at the edges of his sleeves.

“Are they waiting on us?” he asks, looking between Felix and Dimitri.

“Yes. When you three are ready to proceed, we will open the doors. From there, it is just as we discussed. Shall we take another moment?”

Paris shakes his head.

“Alright.” Dimitri nods to the guards. They salute and turn, pushing the doors open.

All of the chatter in the Great Hall falls silent immediately. Through his position at the side, Felix can see the entirety of Dimitri’s court and council—a decade’s worth of work—as a sea of eyes, turned onto them.

Paris grows paler. Battista pats him on the shoulder.

“It will be over very quickly,” Dimitri says. “I will guide you, there is no need to fear. Think of my chocolate head.”

Magdalena laughs.

Felix steps to the side, out of sight. He will take the longer way around to the front of the Great Hall, away from the grand walk that Dimitri and the three children will need to perform, the rites and ceremonies that will follow them along the way. Before he goes, he reaches forward and straightens out Dimitri’s cloak from where it had caught against his leg.

“I’ll see you after, then,” he says.

A gentle motion that freezes, suddenly—from Dimitri, who had reached reflexively to graze his arm in thanks, had realized only in time to stop himself.

Felix does not look. He waits.

Dimitri lowers his hand, disguises the motion as a sweep of his cloak.

“Of course,” he says, and smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> jhfhuehuehufhfhehhgnmnnbnbnbnbnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn ok NOTES
> 
> \- i started writing this bc i saw comments at the end of pt 2 about how it could be read platonically (which was the original intention) and went "fcuk i forgot people wanted romance" so here is romance  
> \- i debated over posting this now or later bc i was worried i would lose motivation to write the next part if i posted this early.. but to be frank this took so long and the next one will also likely take a while. so i thought i might as well share this now  
> \- title this time is taken from chae-pyong song and darcy brandel's translation of yun dong-ju's "prologue." a lot of his work is anti-imperialist stemming from the days of the japanese occupation of korea, which he lived through, and the heart and history of this poem lies there as well! here are a few lines from it that are stunning and that i think about constantly:
> 
> (...) With a heart that sings the stars,  
> I will love all dying things.  
> And I will walk the way  
> that has been given to me.
> 
> edit: forgot that i wanted to mention this, but a lot of this fic was written during/after reading three books that i think heavily ended up influencing the style. check out "this is how you lose the time war" by amal el-mohtar and max gladstone; "there there" by tommy orange; and "know my name" by chanel miller! theyre also all just amazing books (i particularly love the last two)
> 
> ([playlist](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpOLq44ubX22XV5L2XxrVRsoLvjoCefj7))


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